Tag: Poetry

Mother’s Letter to Her Best Friend

By Penny Perry

June 5, 1942

Dear Isabel,

I drove my sister to the doctor’s
in Los Angeles. It all happened
so quickly. I promised to bring her
a chocolate phosphate when
it was over.

She joked with the nurses.
Told them if she puked
from ether she would buy
each of them a pair of nylon
stockings.

She insisted on ether because
her friend Hannah had told her
an abortion would be too
painful without it.

In the waiting room, I picked
up a movie magazine.
During the next ten minutes
I heard a harsh breathing
as though she were gasping.
I told myself she would breathe
differently under ether.

A nurse rushed to the telephone
to call emergency.
My knees collapsed.
I remember the sounds of sirens
on the street, footsteps on the stairs,
the horrible hissing sounds
of the oxygen tent.

I remember words like
“her pulse rate is low.”
“She has a seven-month-old baby
at home.” “Isn’t it a pity?”

Finally, the doctor came out
and said “Your sister is dead.”
The bastard didn’t even have
the sense to shut the door.
I could see her head thrown back
on the table.
He told me to stop screaming.

 

Penny Perry has received six Pushcart nominations. Garden Oak Press published her first novel, Selling Pencils and Charlie, and a collection of her poetry, Santa Monica Disposal and Salvage. New poems are forthcoming in Earth’s Daughters, Lips, the Paterson Literary Review, and the San Diego Poetry Annual. She is the fiction/nonfiction editor of Knot Literary Journal online.

Stringing Them

By William Palmer

 

He catches them each day,
stringing them through their gills,

his trumpeteers
trailing in dark water,

mouths drawn open,
eyes puckered shut.

 

William Palmer’s poetry has appeared in J Journal, Poetry East, and Salamander. He has published two chapbooks—A String of Blue Lights and Humble—and has been interviewed by Grace Cavalieri for The Poet and the Poem from the Library of Congress. Recently he published an op-ed in the Orlando Sentinel on the need for political candidates to embody a life-giving core. He lives in northern Michigan.

Photo credit: Helen Penjam via a Creative Commons license.

Unknowns

By Robin Q. Malin

 

There’s a lot of things I don’t know.

I don’t know what I believe.
I don’t know who I love.
All I know right now is that
when I look into her eyes
I long to trace her cheekbones,
to touch her lips,
to stroke her cherry colored hair
under the stars.
I know that she is beautiful,
that I am not supposed
to want what I think I might want.

I want to write to my father’s god,
to tell him that
I just want to dance with her,
to ask him why the sound
of his silence is so deafening.

I’m sorry.
This poem was supposed
to be about Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
That’s where I started,
because I remembered
the soft sighs, the dissenting
voices of my parents
on the day when marriage
became a fuller and more
encompassing word,
and I don’t remember their
words but I remember
that they felt heavy
and red and broken
and I didn’t know why.

I remember a debate,
a debate that should not
have needed to be a debate
about if because
my name is Woman
it is also Meek, it is also
Equal (But In A Different
And Lower Way).
I remember that Ruth
said let there be nine,
there’s been nine men,
and I wonder if the disciples
were all women,
would scripture be called
blasphemy?
I don’t know.

So now I will tell you what I do know.

I know that the divinity I know
is there in the flickers
of light that shine on her hair,
in the sunset heavy clouds,
in the weight of words
that deny hatred a place
of power.

I know that if there is a heaven,
I want to weave a crown of flowers
and send them up to Ruth,
and ask her how she knew
that life was worth the tears
it took to make it worth living.

 

Photo credit: Miss Ayumaii Kawaii via a Creative Commons license.

Welfare Check East of Downtown

By Christie Valentin-Bati

“It is 2020. Everything is canceled except for police terror.”
–Nick Estes

 

They said close down everything
non-essential: The coffee shop,
blue trimmed with a green porch,
white-potted flowers that hung down
from the awning,
closed – so I roasted my own coffee.
The outlet mall
with high-waisted jeans,
gold-plated, pearl earrings
I’d been saving up to buy
closed too. So I wore nothing
in my ears, dug deep into my closet
and cut my own shorts instead.
They told me to stay home. I stayed home.
I used Instacart. I worked remotely.
I bought surcharged surgical masks off Amazon
though I knew, it wouldn’t help much
to block the droplets should they come.
Still, I was young, white.
I washed my hands regularly,
soaping around the thumb,
between the fingers,
even around my wrists,
I scrubbed clean.
I sexted, watered the plants,
and when I tired, I turned on the TV,
watched the news do its count
of another thousand people dead,
which meant only 100,000
were left to die.
Every now and again
I would peak over the fence,
happy to see my neighborhood
silent and unmoving,
the cars parked, quiet, in the driveways.
If any noise ever did pass through,
a construction truck, police sirens,
I’d pull down my windows
to mute out the sound,
certain that the noise was headed
to another place. I never worried
about any strangers in uniforms
coming to knock on my door,
carrying with them
something more deadly than a virus.

 

Christie Valentin-Bati is a poet and photographer based in small-life suburbia Hollywood, Florida, and soon big city Chicago. She is a co-author of Existential Quandary, a book of haikus from the perspective of a chicken, and her poetry has been featured in Columbia Journal. More of her work can be found on Instagram @_christieos_, Twitter @christiee0_0 or her website christievalentinbati.com.

Photo credit: Alachua County via a Creative Commons license.

O Captain! Some Captain!

By Mark Williams

after Walt Whitman 

O Captain! Some Captain! Our fearful trip’s not done,
The ship is foundering, front to back, the prize we sought’s not won.
The port is far, the chants I hear, the people all protesting,
While follow eyes the unsteady keel, the vessel grim and shaking;

But O heartless, heartless heart!
O the beating blood as red
As the MAGA hat that lies,
On your self-serving head.

O Captain! Some Captain! Rise up and hear the news;
Black Lives Matter flags are flung, for you the bullhorns shrill.
Not for you, bouquets and wreathes—for you the shores a-crowding;
For you we call, the marching masses, our angry faces burning;

Some Captain! Some leader!
You nearly fell on your head.
It’s a nightmare: if on this deck,
You wobble yet next year. O dread!

You Captain answer not our questions, your lips are pale, speak swill.
A leader who intends us harm, your pulse beats all for ill,
The ship’s not anchored safe and sound, its voyage far from done,
If from this trip this vanquished ship does not come in, you’ve won;

Exult not O shores, ring not O bells!
I walk with mournful tread, where
If you steer this ship next year,
our nation sinks cold and dead.

 

Mark Williams’s poems have appeared in The Southern Review, Rattle, Nimrod, New Ohio Review, and The American Journal of Poetry. His poems in response to the Trump administration have appeared in Writers Resist, Poets Reading the News, The New Verse News, and Tuck Magazine. He lives in Evansville, Indiana.

Photo by zhao chen on Unsplash.

Presidential Seal

By Jennifer Shneiderman

 

Slipping into Cadillac One
Gliding on lies and half-truths
Trump greets supporters
waving off warnings
and all that is humane.
He is the clear and present danger.

The SUV
a mobile panic room
used for political theatre
could be the Secret Service
Presidential seal of death.

The truth is a ghost
a shadow
an inconvenience
an artifact
dismissed out of hand.
Turn around and
White House portraits have been replaced
with funhouse mirrors.

Secret Service
doing their duty
following orders.
Only an enemy
would define them as expendable.
The devil is in their detail.

Before the fate is sealed
the future insular, fanatical
overrun by white supremacy
ruled by the stunningly irrational—
Vote like Jim Jones is standing over you
with a syringe.

 

Jennifer Shneiderman is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker living in Los Angeles. Her work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Indolent Book’s HIV Here and Now, The Rubbertop Review, Writers Resist, the Poetry in the Time of COVID-19, Vol 2, anthology, Variant Literature, Bright Flash Literary Review, Wingless Dreamer, Trouvaille Review, Montana Mouthful, the Daily Drunk, Sybil Journal, Unique Poetry, Anti-Heroin Chic, Terror House, Thirteen Myna Birds, Potato Soup Journal, Awakened Voices, GreenPrints, and The Perch. She was the recipient of an Honorable Mention in the 2020 Laura Riding Jackson poetry competition.

Photo by Matthew T Rader on Unsplash.

When I Am Asked to Be More Like the Good Women of Sparta in the Movie ‘300’

By Abby E. Murray

 

The colonel sends a letter
to the families of Tiger Battalion
at the onset of global pandemic.

I am a Tiger spouse now,
which means I am dignified,
according to the colonel.

The tigers in the zoo closest to us
have paced so long in their habitat
they communicate in sunken spirals,

insane, glaring past their fence
with eyes the color of honey
or fossilized sap, the color

of sweetness or preservation,
maybe both. I assume they
continue to speak in circles

without shrinking from human chaos
not because they are dignified
so much as they cannot shrink.

But this is not about tigers or a name
thrown to me like a new toy,
a bloody chop to chew.

The colonel asks us to remain calm,
be more like the good women
of Sparta in the movie 300:

supportive, exemplary,
confident in their warriors.
He says we must be the foundation

upon which our soldiers succeed
and I imagine myself painted
in orange and black on an urn

in some museum,
my placard purring about
how I’m allowed to be wise,

allowed to own land,
allowed to speak,
permitted, given, blessed.

Now I’m pissed. Now I’m hungry.
On behalf of Spartan women
I want to ask the colonel:

what is there for me to praise here?
Is it the good of the state,
balanced on my head like poisoned meat?

or is it my beloved himself,
who lets me grow strong?
I send no response to the colonel,

who probably translates silence
as agreement, the sound of a tame woman
pacing the earth—fearsome

but composed in her containment.
See how I wear a grave into the earth
just by walking on it?

 

Abby E. Murray is the editor of Collateral, a literary journal concerned with the impact of violent conflict and military service beyond the combat zone. She teaches rhetoric in writing military strategy for army officers on fellowship from the Army War College at the University of Washington, and she offers free creative writing workshops for immigrants, soldiers, veterans, and their loved ones around Tacoma, Washington, where she is the city’s poet laureate. Her book, Hail and Farewell, won the Perugia Press Poetry Prize and was released in September 2019. You can reach her at www.abbyemurray.com.

Image of Greek amphora, 540 BC, from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC.

For E.G.

By Matt Barnsley

 

there’s a drip
drip
drip
that comes with being
american

it soaks DuBois’ veil
and smothers the mouth
the nose
a personalized waterboarding
half dead, half alive

there’s a gasping
gasp
gasp
that echoes in our
ears

it drowns out the cries
the gunshots
the standby videos
and a man who can’t breathe

 

Matt Barnsley is the editor and founder of New American Legends, an online literary journal aimed at uplifting underrepresented voices in the genres of sci-fi, horror, and adventure. He is also the author of several plays, most notably The Play My Mother Hates, which garnered positive reviews from City Pages, A/V Club, and others. He holds an M.F.A. from Concordia University and his work has also been featured in SPIRES, and NGY Review. As a freelance copywriter, his words have been featured on product packaging, social media platforms, and advertisements. He is currently working on his second novel. He resides in Minnesota with an assortment of domesticated animals.

Photo by Raphael Lovaski on Unsplash.

Women Wearing White

By Carol Sadtler

 

not just for purity but justice
as suffragettes wore white
for the vote, as Hillary’s
white pantsuit honors them,
as all the women of every
color in the House wear
white one night and the
Speaker claps back to power,
as on the day Madame Speaker,
in white bespoke pantsuit, begins
to impeach, as a pushy newsman
tries to put the word hate
in her mouth, as she says
“Don’t mess with me
when it comes to words like that”
as she strides away
her white suit unsullied.

 

Carol Sadtler is a freelance writer and editor who does her best thinking on, near, or in the water. She lives in Chicago with her family. Her poems have appeared in Rhino Poetry, where she served as associate editor 2018-19; Pacific Review; The Tishman Review; and other publications.

Photo of the Victory Column by Goke Obasa on Unsplash.

Sonnet for the Woman in Walgreens

By Diane Elayne Dees

 

It’s been a week or two since our encounter,
yet your voice haunts me, and I see your face
in waking dreams. There, at the checkout counter,
you yelled and gestured as you made your case:
“It’s all a hoax!” you shouted, while the clerk
delivered a lecture on government regulations,
declaring—as she put aside her work—
that we are so much cleaner than other nations.
I wonder if you’re staying safe inside,
washing your hands, and canceling your cruise—
or are you spreading the virus far and wide,
and getting tips from experts at Fox News?
I think of you, your rage, your blind belief;
there’s no vaccine for that, and no relief.

 

Diane Elayne Dees has two poetry chapbooks, I Can’t Recall Exactly When I Died and  Coronary Truth, forthcoming. Her microchap, Beach Days, can be downloaded from the Origami Poems Project website. Diane also publishes Women Who Serve, a blog that delivers news and commentary on women’s professional tennis throughout the world. Visit her author site, Diane Elayne Dees, Poet and Writer-at-Large.

Photo by Adam Nieścioruk on Unsplash.

Good Night

By Angela Costi

 

In 1993,
I walked the night
through Alma Park, St Kilda, from 10 pm
to 4 am, no chaperone, no iPhone,
the poetry gig would end
I would leave
take the tram
no taxi, no text-talk, no self-talk,
and walk
for blocks
through city lanes, urban parks, industrial streets
half a city and two suburbs of walking
to clear the day’s debris.

It was night who befriended me
when my house was slashing and stabbing,
I kept clear of the family room,
unpacked my tantrums
with insomniacs, nurses
and night feeders.

Now 2019, I walk
with no moon for witness
my steps are the loud protest,
I hear muffled blasts
of his outrage
her resentment
in a house I pass.

A hunched figure
sparks the path,
slows down
to show
a girl.

We nod
like soldiers
at the frontline.

 

Angela Costi’s poetry collections are: Dinted Halos (Hit&Miss Publications, 2003), Prayers for the Wicked (Floodtide Audio and Text, 2005), Honey and Salt (Five Islands Press, 2007) and Lost in Mid-Verse (Owl Publishing, 2014). An award from the National Languages Board in 1995, enabled her to study Ancient Greek drama in Greece. She received funding from the Australia Council to work in Japan on an international collaboration involving her poetry, which she documented as poetic narrative and essays at: http://cordite.org.au/author/angelacosti/

Photo by Krzysztof Kowalik on Unsplash.

Humanity

By Steven Croft

 

Wants to believe kindness, its namesake, can still a morning rain
of bombs, calm the lightning strike of artillery shells on cratered streets
scorched hot and unlivable as the surface of the sun

Wants to believe foresight will quiet the chainsaws’ outcry against
ancient trees in the last remaining rainforests, make abandoned
the coal-fired cooling towers as monuments to itself, leave at least some
of the fish in the sea

Wants to believe in the white sorcery of hope: we will never be starving
animals on a dying planet, we are not tongueless to stop a world’s
unraveling, wants to believe in good hearts joining us together in time
like a savior walking out of a desert, the world as scry bowl of better angels

 

Steven Croft lives on a barrier island off the coast of Georgia on a property lush with vegetation. For the last thirteen years he has worked in a library.  He has recent poems in Sky Island Journal, As It Ought to Be Magazine, Poets Reading the News, I Am Not A Silent Poet, Third Wednesday, Red Eft Review, and other places.

Photo credit: Xavier Vergés via a Creative Commons license.

Donald Trump’s Titanic

By Cassandra Henken

 

The world today
is like watching a shipwreck in slow motion.

Donald Trump
is the iceberg, and America is
the Titanic. We laughed
about being able to smell ice
when it’s near—

Iceberg, right ahead!
We elected him anyway.
Just as they said,
“God himself could not sink this ship!”
when they knew there were not enough lifeboats,
it takes someone equally cold-hearted
to hold the Bible in one hand
and smite the lowly with the other.

Now we’re bobbing in the water,
our ship asunder,
and still, there are those
who say the ship is unsinkable,
even though thousands of people have died,
(even as the cold settled in
choking on their own breath
and they swallowed the Atlantic).

Listen closely enough,
and bullets sound like Morse code.
Men desperate to get into a lifeboat,
to live,
were shot even as they drowned.

Imagine the headlines—

“Titanic Hits the Same Iceberg Twice!”

We accept prayers via memes
or monetary compensation.

 

Cassandra Henken is a mother of three living in Minnesota. She has her Bachelor’s of Science in Psychology and Early Childhood Development. She worked for almost five years as a Behavior Therapist for children with Autism Spectrum Disorder. Now she is going back to school for a Bachelor’s of Arts in English and Fiction Writing. She has always loved the written word and been interested in politics, the culmination of which resulted in “Donald Trump’s Titanic.”

Photo in the public domain.

 

¡Despierta!

By Ada Ardére 

 

She lies rotting in saltwater that thrashes about white resorts
that in their time and in their place drown out her voice
as it would otherwise be heard begging, pleading, screaming
for the lives of her children as they sit in wards without power,
diabetic comas consuming the elderly and children equally
while Brooks Brothers suit clad Epstein socialite collaborators
avert their eyes from her teary visage in slave-maintained
golf clubs across the sea refusing to acknowledge her
in any way but kicks and spit upon the whore they sell,
upon the bloodied lips and cracked teeth of a mother of millions
without water or food or even the dignity of acknowledgement!

She is remembering for them all the counts and strikes upon their bodies
in the century since forced annexation where experiments
upon illiterate women gave rise to mainland women’s endless fucking and
the cessation of hormonal migraines and acne for little girls in elite schools
who would never see the effects of nuclear testing on her northern coasts,
oh she remembers for them, she refuses to let death or time erase
the millions of hours of modern indentured servitude that her
children were deceived into for the cost of a boat ride to a land
they were already citizens of but still not yet seen as anything
but the dark skinned/too pale inbetweeners of a failed negro kingdom
the lazy, laid-back rapists, thieves of virtue, papists thirsting for jobs!

She is listening to the century long echoed call and response of the tired
cry from Lares whose drone was cannons and drums from
the hearts of those who still remember the Taíno name, to those
as they roar the name of both tormentor and consoler, ¡Maria!,
to the silence of supposed compatriots in congressional halls
whose only gestures are public prayers for miracles they
could manifest themselves in otherwise forgettable acts
of mercy if only they did not reduce her and her people
to lesser than dogs, and she listens to the swelling response:
a beast cannot be made more beastly nor can its cry
be muted as it awakens to the only means that is left to it!

 

Ada Ardére is a Puerto Rican poet from New Orleans, who now lives in Kansas City. She studied philosophy of art and Plato, and loves beat poetry. Her poems have recently appeared in 34th Parallel Magazine and online in Wussy Mag.

Map of 1863 Puerto Rico from New York Public Library.

75th Remembrance Poem

By Michel Steven Krug

 

Another night, so far beyond famished,
the stubby pencil rescued from gravel

sharpened by secret pebbles to
write about the ingredients of normalcy.

Ilona from Budapest narrates:

two cups of flour, 3/4 cup sugar,
an egg or two (depends on size),
a finger of baking powder,
touch of vanilla,
crushed sugar cubes,
1/2 cup diced tart cherries.

The mind travels to a Shabbat dinner
leaving the nihilist barracks, taste of torts

and coffee displacing arid mouths
and acrid hope, imagination baking cakes of

liberation served at future tables
where the progeny is not just from two but of a

whole collection of souls deprived of morning.

 

A note from the poet: This 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz remembrance poem is inspired by uncountable sources, but most recently an article in the Minneapolis StarTribune.

I’m a Minneapolis poet, fiction writer, former print journalist, Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars graduate, and practicing lawyer. I’m also Senior Editor for Poets Reading the News (PRTN) literary magazine. My poems have appeared in Mizmor Anthology 2019, PRTN, Sheepshead, Ginosko, Door Is A Jar, Raven’s Perch, Tuck Magazine, Poetry24, 2 Elizabeths, Main Street Rag, the Brooklyn Review and others.

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash.

my body, my choice

By Kitty Anarchy

 

jesus said?
jesus is dead.
jesus don’t
have what’s
between our legs

our cavities
ovaries
fallopian tubes
uterus
cervix

not just
vagina!

could you
even name
the parts
tucked deep
inside us?

jesus’
mary magdalene
history
erased

resurrected
in us
now who’s
two-faced

men
preach
and give mandates

not to have their
dicks altered
but to do things to us

because jesus said.
but jesus is dead.

 

Kitty Anarchy is an anarchafeminist, chicana womyn poet and short story writer. She has a background in social work, having earned her MSW from California State University, Long Beach, and listens to KPFK radio. She has seven cats, her favorite being ChiChi, and two dogs named Nibbit and Chato. She is published in Chiron Review, Rabid Oak Journal, Los Angeles Review, Ghost Town Literary Journal, and in anthologies through Arroyo Seco Press and Picture Show Press. Learn more at www.kittyanarchy.com.

“Maria Magdalene” by Jan van Scorel, 1530.

Eulogy for the Unfriended

By Jon Wesick

 

We gather to mourn the loss of
Alice stroking her brown-and-white Saint Bernard,
Barbara embracing her acoustic guitar,
Cheryl who tipsy on Chianti flirted with me
at Don’s going-away dinner,
Roberta who toured Chinese Zen temples,
Brad who worked nonviolence into his martial arts
when evicting drunks from a topless bar,
Jeff whose poems meander from sarcasm to irony and back,
Jerry the pot-smoking Vietnam vet always quick with a joke,
and Rob who volleyed batshit ideas with me on the improv stage.

Holding cognitive dissonance
in respect for nonconforming facts,
I’ve paused over the unfriend button for years but
what do I say to Harriet who wants me booted
out of the country for not praying to her god?

Scratch a profile picture. Get a noxious gas
of racist dog whistles and totalitarian sympathies –
praise for Joseph McCarthy’s blacklist, beating protestors,
and banning the press from exposing politicians’ deceit.

Skepticism turns on science and medicine
while leaving hype and spin unquestioned.
Deadly lies infiltrate like a puppy
with a suicide bomb. Measles and whooping cough
back in style. Bound feet, lead makeup, whalebone corsets.

Friendship wears a warning sign.
Trust, an electric fence.

 

Jon Wesick is a regional editor of the San Diego Poetry Annual. He’s published hundreds of poems and stories in journals such as the Atlanta Review, Berkeley Fiction Review, Metal Scratches, Pearl, Slipstream, Space and Time, Tales of the Talisman, and Zahir. The editors of Knot Magazine nominated his story “The Visitor” for a Pushcart Prize. His poem “Meditation Instruction” won the Editor’s Choice Award in the 2016 Spirit First Contest. Another poem “Bread and Circuses” won second place in the 2007 African American Writers and Artists Contest. “Richard Feynman’s Commute” shared third place in the 2017 Rhysling Award’s short poem category. Jon is the author of the poetry collection Words of Power, Dances of Freedom, several novels, and, most recently, the short-story collection The Alchemist’s Grandson Changes His Name. Learn more at http://jonwesick.com.

 

The Bean Peddlers

By Matthew Moniz

an ekphrasis of the Trumps’ Goya photos
after Gwendolyn Brooks

They count beans mostly, this vain green-eyed pair.
Ruling is a casual affair.
Stretched stares on stretched and creaking smiles,
Desks bare.

Two who are Mostly Vile.
Two who have wasted days,
But keep on wanting more
And wanting things their way.

And remembering…
Remembering, with hunger and hate,
As they pose over the beans in their white-
washed offices that
are full of iron collars and green pockets and
red hands,
red hats that say America was Great.

 

Matthew Moniz is a metaphysical anthropologist and incoming PhD student in poetry at the University of Southern Mississippi. Originally from the DC area, he holds a BA from Notre Dame and an MFA and MA from McNeese State University. Matt’s work has appeared in Crab Orchard Review and has been awarded the SCMLA Poetry Prize. He served as Poetry Editor of The McNeese Review’s 2020 issue and Poetry Panel Chair for SCMLA’s 2019 conference. He is left-handed, is allergic to cheese, and knows Adam West is the only good Batman.

Photo credit: Counse via a Creative Commons license.

Tail of Masculinity

By Ben P. Effiòng

 

I was born into a society
Defined by fraternities
In a hospital ward decorated with partiality
My birth, celebrated like African obesity
This was the privilege attached to my sexuality
I was born a male, with the tail of masculinity

Birthed into this artificiality
Characteristic of ma/pa-triarchy
I sat on the throne of gender roles
Nodding to the rhythm of privilege carols
Sowing seeds of sexism without parole
While getting used by the “second sex” I tagged as whores

I was born into a fraternity
Malignant to femininity
Where being a “man” meant wearing the identity
And non-membership equated with docility
Where ability was defined by “controlling” your family
And the symbol of manhood entrenched in brutality

I was born into patriarchy
The shameless face of matriarchy
That demonizes “courtesy” as a weakness
And being unmarried by women a sickness

I was born a male, with the tail of masculinity
But, I’ll die a rebel, with tales of equality.

 

Ben P. Effiòng is a philosopher, award-winning poet, and a debater whose articles and poetry have been published in both national and international newspapers and anthologies. Ben believes in using the power of creative expression to create social change. Follow him on Twitter @Benblag.

Photo by Crawford Jolly on Unsplash.

woman king

By Emily Mardelle

 

I cut my hair off because my father would slide

his hands over my stomach and tell me how fat I was getting

and I

I think sometimes I want to make a woman king

so the moon can finally avenge the girls in the nighttime

imagine her thick hair long and her breasts full

and free

 

Emily Mardelle is an emerging writer whose essay “The Monster in My Corner” was published by the online magazine Sweatpants & Coffee in April 2019. She previously worked as a blogger for Arizona’s Superstition Review, where she was a liaison between national writers and the magazine. She graduated from Arizona State University in the spring of 2020 with a degree in English Literature and a minor in Sociology. Emily’s work draws from her experiences with PTSD, bisexuality, and womanhood. She currently resides in Phoenix, Arizona. Follow her on Instagram @emilymardelle and Twitter @emmardell.

Hangakujo, female samurai, from the U.S. Library of Congress.