Poetry – Page 13 – Writers Resist

I See You

By Laura Martinez

First you are “pollo”
chicken.
Then you are “illegal”
just so much contraband
or “alien”
strange creature from another place
to be feared.
Less than human.

I walk with you
through the streets of Nogales,
sit with you as you prepare
for your journey,
as you pray the rosary.

I see you in the desert
exhausted and thirsty,
and I see your haunted eyes
as you are detained, chained and
branded a “criminal.”
The smell of broken dreams
permeates the air.

You are a human being,
someone’s husband, mother,
daughter, son,
who lives, loves,
suffers, endures,
never deterred from the promise
of a better, safer life.

I am a retired social worker and volunteer with a local humanitarian aid group that supplies water to migrants in the desert. I also am with a local group that coordinates nationally to end the criminalization of migration. My poems have been published locally in the Tucson Weekly and Arizona Daily Star. I am a regular contributor to an online magazine, Downtown LA Life.

Photo credit: Jasper Nance via a Creative Commons license.

Poem Where I Mix-Up Fairy Tales

By Courtney LeBlanc

Sometimes the wolf shows up in a suit,
hair neat and tie perfect, teeth tucked
into his mouth to mimic a sly smile.
Sometimes he’s a friend, sometimes
a stranger, sometimes a lover.
Sometimes I crave the beast’s
hands on my skin, sometimes I want
his bite, sometimes I don’t want
to be rescued. I wish this sleep could
last forever, my still body tended
by the forest and the animals, hidden
from the prince’s kiss — why wake
up in a world that constantly kicks
and takes away my rights. I’ll take
the beast to get his library, I’ll take
the spindle to finally catch up
on my sleep, I’ll take the wolf
to avoid future errands. And
that house of sugar? I’ll lick
every windowpane and wait
for the witch. She won’t push me
into the fire, instead we’ll sit
around it, spiked drinks in hand,
munching on cookies, toasting
our luck at finding one another.

Courtney LeBlanc is the author of Beautiful & Full of Monsters (forthcoming from Vegetarian Alcoholic Press), and chapbooks All in the Family (Bottlecap Press) and The Violence Within (Flutter Press). She is a Pushcart Prize nominee and has her MBA from University of Baltimore and her MFA from Queens University of Charlotte. She loves nail polish, wine, and tattoos. Read her publications on her blog: www.wordperv.com. Follow her on Twitter, @wordperv, and Instagram, @wordperv79.

To the Racist in Line for Chinese Food at Safeway

By Ty.Brack

Yes, you are racist.
I know this because of the way you reduced
Estefania and America to colored women.
I know this because Estefania was helping me
and America was helping you.
You and I ordered the Express Special at the same time.
Estefania returned with my container
before America returned with yours,
and Estefania asked, Rice or chow—
You cut her off with a grumble, Chow mein,
like you were so sure this was America
and she belonged to you.
When Estefania looked at you with confusion,
you looked at Estefania like she was your America,
and you grumbled again, this time with seething chauvinism,
Chow. Mein.
Estefania’s confusion changed to composure
as she said in her smoothest customer service voice,
Sir, I was actually helping the other gentlemen;
America will be right with you.
I watched the creases in your forehead
flatten into lines of seasoned microaggressions,
revealing your familiar fragile rage
over the blanks between the lines.
So I filled in the blanks for you,
Dude, you’re racist.
But I don’t think I offended you enough.
So now you’re in a poem.

Ty.Brack is a poet and teacher from Portland, Oregon, who believes each word should aid in the dismantling of the white heterosexual, cisgender, male supremacy. He performs his work through Portland Poetry Slam, Slamlandia, and Wordlights, and he doubles as a hip hop recording artist, with several singles available on major digital streaming platforms. Follow him on Instagram: @ty.brack.poetry.

Photo credit: DijutalTim via a Creative Commons license.

Indian Doll for Sale at the Thrift Store

By Heather Johnson

A middle-aged woman, orange hair tightly
permed, bones jostling within a threadbare

corset, manhandles the wide-eyed Native
doll—hands pet imitation-buckskin fringe

dress, sewn with plastic beads. A smile parts
lips like the sheer cut of a razor

as she rubs her thumbs over the doll’s sprayed-on
brown skin—as his fingers explored

and claimed the landscape of my body—Your skin looks
great against mine: brown on white. But the doll’s

skin is flawless, no evidence of cutting
scars at the wrists, thighs, shoulder, or at the hollow

between the breasts—he mapped the shimmery
ridges of those scars, too. The doll’s hand-painted

eyes are brown with black flecks, glaze
and shade like mine. The woman clutches

the doll against slack chest, hand cupping
the back of her head—synthetic

black hair parted down the middle, tied
in pigtails, with a headband snug

over her brow, restraining memory. He wrapped
my hair around his fist, pulled until my back

bowed, until he came hard—Can you grow it longer?
I amputated my hair, dyed it punk-red, and the color

bled out slowly in the shower.

Heather Johnson is an androgynous Diné writer from the Navajo Nation, currently residing in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She is at work on a novel, a memoir, and poetry. Her work has appeared, or is forthcoming in, Prairie Schooner, the Sigma Tau Delta’s The Triangle, Anti-Heroin Chic, and HeArt (Human Equity Through Art). Her poetry will be anthologized in the Dine Reader: A Guide to Navajo Poetics. Previously, she was a blog contributor to Blue Mesa Review. Her subjects are surviving personal and historical traumas, the experiences of marginalized identities, the complexities of mental health and well-being, and the landscape as sacred. She is also a founding member of the Trigger Warning Writers Group.

Two poems by Cheryl Dumesnil

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Bible Study

Truly I tell you,

The life expectancy

whatever you do

for transgender women of color

for these sisters of mine,

living in the United States

that you do unto me.

is thirty-one years old.

Matthew 25:40

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What You Must Believe

As a mound of dust and a mouthful of spit
is to a brick,

as that one spit-and-dust brick
is to a wall

is to a shelter for a family
fed by one pot

hung over a fire tended all day
and all night, too—

my love, this
is how you will survive—

as a spoon scraping concrete
is to escape—

no matter what they do
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Cheryl Dumesnil is the author of two books of poetry, Showtime at the Ministry of Lost Causes and In Praise of Falling (University of Pittsburgh Press), and a memoir, Love Song for Baby X (Ig Publishing). A freelance writer and writing coach, she lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her wife and two kids. Read more about Cheryl here.

Photo credit: Francisco Gonzalez via a Creative Commons license.

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Subliminal and Unanimous Dreams of the Future

By Kimberly Kaufman

In the shadowy, damp cities of our eon
no Martian parent will guilt their children
into eating their slimy green protein crumbles
with stories of the starving Children of Earth

As the dust storms rage above no Martian
child will flick internal game consoles, the
giant screens their only chance to marvel at
the blue, cool expanse of the Pacific ocean

No Martian will stagger through the thick,
viscous gravity, envying Earth refugees
who had a chance to spin and fall in warm air
without seventy pounds of protective plastic shell

As Martian children grow to moody, tense teens
they will never dream of an ozone layer keeping
them safe from this hostile universe that waits for
the first opportunity to twist their skulls inside out

We will not look out the window
to a night filled with two shrunken,
misshapen moons,
whispering,
the Earth
she was irreplaceable,
but we lost her

I have previously published speculative fiction in various literary magazines, including Metaphorosis, The Future Fire, and Jersey Devil Press. A brief list of things I’ve been, am, or will be: a student of Spanish literature, a lawyer, a punk bass guitarist, a traveler, a quiet child, and a mountain climber.

Photo credit: Mars dust storm, NASA.

Wealth of Nations

By Gemma Cooper-Novack

Jeff Bezos wrote a
capitalist haiku and
we all live in it

Gemma Cooper-Novack’s debut poetry collection We Might As Well Be Underwater, a finalist for the Central New York Book Award, was published by Unsolicited Press in 2017. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in more than twenty journals, including Glass, Midway Journal, and Lambda’s Poetry Spotlight, and have been nominated for multiple Pushcart Prizes and Best of the Net Awards. Her plays have been produced in Chicago, Boston, and New York. Gemma was a runner-up for the 2016 James Jones First Novel Fellowship, and she has been awarded artist residencies from Catalonia to Virginia and a grant from the Barbara Deming Fund. She is a doctoral candidate in Literacy Education at Syracuse University.

Photo by Rick Tap on Unsplash.

what’s happening with the boys

By Lou Ella Hickman

what’s happening with the boys

our prayers & thoughts

bullied?

bang, bang you’re dead

a moment of silence

easy access?

what’s happening with the boys

new laws won’t help

video games?

bang, bang you’re dead

our prayers & thoughts

absent fathers?

what’s happening with the boys

a moment of silence

movies, tv?

bang, bang you’re dead

new laws won’t help

copy cat?

what’s happening with the boys

our thoughts and prayers

a. none of the above
b. all of the above
c. some of the above

flood gates break open voices into the streets

we’ve had enough we’ve had enough

listen please listen how can we get you to listen

to what’s happening with the boys

Sister Lou Ella has a master’s in theology from St. Mary’s University in San Antonio and is a former teacher and librarian. She is a certified spiritual director, poet, and writer. Her poems have appeared in numerous magazines, including, America, First Things, Emmanuel, Third Wednesday, and new verse news as well as in four anthologies: The Night’s Magician: Poems about the Moon, edited by Philip Kolin and Sue Brannan Walker, Down to the Dark River edited by Philip Kolin, Secrets, edited by Sue Brannan Walker, and After Shocks: The Poetry of Recovery for Life-Shattering Events, edited by Tom Lombardo. She was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2017. Her first book of poetry, entitled she: robed and wordless, was published in 2015 (Press 53).

Photo by Clem Onojeghuo on Unsplash.

On Sending Her Back

By Abby E. Murray

for Ilhan Omar

The man with no back
to return to—
which is to say there is
no path to safety
from the cliff where he clings,
no escape to remind him
the way back is his—
has wished to banish,
send back, cast out
a woman whose back is
all of us, whose back is
her body, a root, a beam
that bears the weight
of home and all its backache,
walls built up and smashed
around the same tree
that makes its rings
into shelters for shelter
and the origin of leaves
that backflip in the sun,
their dance of gratitude—
which is to say
this woman’s back is a gift,
given to her once
by her mother, a stack
of crowns stuffed
with the nerve to rise
and remain and never
turn back toward a time
when she was not,
when her steps
couldn’t be traced
back to the place where
she is, here, with us,
an orchard of spines
that grow deeper
each time a woman
is told to go back.

Abby E. Murray is the editor of Collateral, a literary journal publishing work concerned with the impact of violent conflict and military service beyond the combat zone. She is the poet laureate for the city of Tacoma, Washington, where she teaches community workshops for veterans, civilians, military families, and undocumented youth. Her first book, Hail and Farewell, won the Perugia Press Poetry Prize and will be released in September 2019.

Photo credit: Chris Devers via a Creative Commons license.

Longing to Belong

By Elizabeth Weaver

girl with eyes too large and
milky teeth fairies must wait
years for in country that ripped
her from Mama locked her in
metal cage no laughter crosses
her howl swells into lost
others’ sounds for families
babies resounds past soiled
dreams strips belonging as
those ripping teach children
how arms are weapons

Elizabeth Weaver, M.A., is a Squaw Valley Community Writer whose work appears in dirtcakes, RATTLE, 5AM, and other publications. Visit her website at ElizabethOakleyWeaver.com.

Photo credit: United Nations.

We Are Not America

By Diane Elayne Dees

America is Mexico, Columbia, Brazil,
Argentina, Canada. It is Paraguay,
El Salvador, Guatemala, Uruguay, Venezuela,
and Chile. America is Ecuador, Nicaragua,
Bolivia, and Honduras. It requires a lot of nerve
to take the name of two huge continents
and make it your own. We are the man
who stands against the bar, sprawling
his arms and legs so wide that no one can sit.
We are the woman who takes up three seats
with her body, her purse, her computer,
and her yoga mat. We are the truck
that occupies two parking spaces,
the teenager who sits in the middle of the floor
and makes everyone step around him.
We are a lot of things, both good and bad.
But we are not America.

Diane Elayne Dees’ poetry has been published in many journals and anthologies. Diane, who lives in Covington, Louisiana, also publishes Women Who Serve, a blog that delivers news and commentary on women’s professional tennis throughout the world. Her chapbook, I Can’t Recall Exactly When I Died, is forthcoming form Clare Songbirds Publishing House. Also forthcoming, from Kelsay Books, is Diane’s chapbook, Coronary Truth. Her author blog is Diane Elayne Dees.

Daughteret is not a made-up word

By H. E. Casson

for Tarana Burke

Your whisper met with stone and echoed back
“A cave is not a prison,” ricocheted
Ancestors live in each abraded crack
A line from renegade to renegade

I see your eyes are tired, heart is sore
Body bearing scar and gash and grit
In counting these eleven years and more
For all the voices to escape the pit

But thunder brings deluge to drown them out
And scavengers come picking at their bones
The repercussion grows into a shout
A hundred thousand you-are-not-alones

And even as my echoes hit the wall
I’m thankful that you chose to speak at all

H. E. Casson lives in a very small house in Toronto with one human, no pets and 28 plants. They are a library technician and writer whose work has been published in Room, Cricket, Jones Av., (EX)Cite, Smart Moves, and Today’s Parent Toronto, among others.

Poet’s note: When I chose to use the classic form of the sonnet, I realized that, even though sonnet means little song, it sounds male. I imagined the line of daughters going back generations, much the way we have linked histories father to son. As a bit of an aside to myself, I started calling my poem a daughteret instead of a sonnet. This made me think about how quickly women and genderqueer people are mocked for creating words that include us or scratch at the surface of the status quo. I see criticisms that our words are “made up” as though the existing words sprung from nature or were handed down by god. Daughteret is an organic expression of an idea I had when writing about a woman who takes care of so many daughters. When I realized the poem needed a name, I could think of nothing better than to share a word that grew out of my admiration for her.

Photo credit: Lynn Friedman via a Creative Commons license.

Suspension

By Mandy Brown

When their skins have thinned with age,
they will still tell the story: thirteen people
suspended over Portland bridge
to stop a Shell tanker. “I was one of them,”
she will tell his children. “I regret
nothing,” he will tell hers. Living
sometimes means hanging at the end
of a knot. Some dangle by their necks,
counting the breaths. Others ride the swings,
pumping their knees. I have been both,
but these days all I can think about is
how I haven’t come out to my parents
or friends, how my husband and my
poetry are the only beings who know
I am queer and poly, how life was simpler before
I noticed all the oil. He invited a friend
over who could answer so many of my
questions. He teased me as he helped
me choose an outfit and cooked us dinner.
I spent the whole time wondering what
love he must have to expect nothing and
still knot his fingers in mine while I—like the thirteen
lives spinning in air underneath commuting
cars—suspend in limbo to watch her eyes dilate.

Mandy Brown (she/her) is a queer Central Texas poet, a 2019 Poetry Half-Marathon winner, and the 2013 recipient of A Room of Her Own Foundation’s Tillie Olsen Fellowship. Her poetry has been published in Vine Leaves Literary Journal, Extract(s), Eunoia Review, and more. Mandy currently teaches at an alternative school for high-risk students and loves it! Read more at mandyalyssbrown.weebly.com.

Photo credit: Steve Dipaola, Greenpeace.

Hymn of Thanksgiving

By IE Sommsin

Rejoice now, thou Christian boldly sneering.
Thine nation is ruled by one most holy
who in deed mocks the sick and the lowly,
but who knows what thou hate and art fearing.
Hark! For he hath come to enrich the rich
and bring comfort to the brazen craven
with their condos, yachts, and idols graven.
Truly they whine and cry; they also bitch.
It’s members only in his promised land,
now going through major renovation
to bring a little class to salvation;
lo, the righteous must come with cash in hand.
About the weak and strange we need not fret.
Be at peace and get all that thou can get.

IE Sommsin, a writer and artist from Kentucky, lives in San Francisco and has a fondness for sonnets

Illustration: “Tower” by IE Sommsin.

Reverse Existential Crisis

By Emmett Forrest

My mom used to tell this story all the time
When the nurses tried to give me yet another shot
I glared at the nurses until they cried
When the doctor tried to slip in another IV
he needed 3 nurses to hold down a blue faced baby
By the time I was 6
I had more IVs prick my veins than I could count
To be fair
I couldn’t count very high
You see, Death and I are quite acquainted.

Many of my friends are beginning to realize
That death will knock on their door one day
I am already used to hearing death
Breathe outside the window

There is a problem with familiar morbidity
I run myself ragged trying to make my days “worth it”
Trying to make ripples into waves
I forget that this body is a body
To this day I am reminded of the sacrifices
My parents made to keep this body alive
The cigarettes my dad put away
The job my mom lost
The cost of my medications

When my friend asks me if I want to be
A 90 year old with boobs
I am shocked at the premise
That I could be 90 one day
You see, when doctors tell you
You’re lucky to be alive
You believe them
And wonder when you’re luck will run out

I am staring out of a bus window
The noise in my head clears, for a moment
Like the sun creaking in between clouds
I admit to myself that I want to be a teacher one day
That I want to be the adult at the front of the classroom
Guiding the next generation into their tomorrows
Like my teachers of yesterday’s gently guided me
I want students to see me as a glimmer of the future

It is 2AM
I wake up crying
Because I dreamt that I was a father
I adopted a son
Taught him what it could mean to be a self made man
Showed him gentle masculinity

I am crying because
I realize that I’ve been living with
other people’s dreams in the space of my own
I am crying because
I wonder if people will regret their cigarettes, the job, the 150$ a month
If I cannot become a woman, a wife, a mother
I am crying because
I am afraid I won’t get to see my own dreams
Now that I am holding them in my hands
Like fragile hatchlings
I am crying because
For the first time I realize
I don’t want to live every day like it’s my last
I don’t want to just survive, just staying above water
I want to see many more tomorrows
And I am crying because
For the first time I realize
This life is mine

Emmett Forrest is a transmasculine engineer working in the Boston area. He got his bachelor’s at MIT and currently spends his days writing poetry, playing with their lizard, and enjoying the little bit of sun that Boston spring has to offer.

Photo by Alexis Fauvet on Unsplash.

St. Donald, Patron Saint of Denial

By Laura King

The tweets come to rest
on his chest and shoulders
as he gives a first-light
audience to the Presidential roses.

Last night’s dream still shimmers:
a waterfall, biggest ever, in New York,
backsplashed with diamonds,
applauded by palms, lush as a vulva.

He won’t say “climate change.”
That would break the spell
of the present moment, who,
like a beautiful woman, stands

petal soft, her head turned.
No one sees the future striding
toward her, hard as diamonds.
No one shouts until he grabs.

Laura King litigates climate change cases from Helena, Montana. Her poems have appeared in 14 by 14, Goblin Fruit, Lucid Rhythms, and Inlandia, and have been nominated by the Science Fiction Poetry Association for the Dwarf Stars award.

From the Bottom (of my heart, my head)

By Jacquelyn “Jacsun” Shah

I know I can’t, I won’t, I don’t rebel
although the current Top is not correct.
And I am impotent, cannot expel

the Top. It’s spinning like a carrousel
whose platform and its horses are unchecked.
I know I can’t, I won’t, I don’t rebel.

A beast, the Top is hardly like gazelle
or rabbit. Top is something I reject
but I am impotent, cannot expel

the Top. It surely has a putrid smell
assaulting normal noses. I detect,
but know I can’t, I won’t, I don’t rebel.

A bully, Top will badmouth, trounce and quell
perceived opponents, anyone who’s suspect.
And I am impotent, cannot expel

the Top. It’s mad, it’s bad, the Top is hell,
so totally devoid of intellect.
I know I can’t, I won’t expel,
but impious within this villanelle, rebel
I can. Topple Top. It’s wrecked, I ring its knell.

Jacquelyn “Jacsun” Shah, M.A., M.F.A., Ph.D., has received grants from the University of Houston and the Houston Arts Alliance. Shah’s poetry has appeared in journals and anthologies, such as Cranky, Tar River Poetry, The Texas Review, Anon (Britain), Rhino, and Vine Leaves Literary Journal (Australia). Her poetry chapbook, small fry, was published by Finishing Line Press (2017); a full-length poetry book, What to Do with Red, by LitFestPress (2018); and she’s a recent winner of Literal Latté’s Food Verse contest. She lives in Houston, Texas, with her partner Iris and a Persian cat, Eliot. Visit her website.

Photo credit: Manel Torralba via a Creative Commons license.

To, Not With

By Sydney E. Beaurivage

Most readers associate themselves with the writer

Empathizing with the words

Do not do this

My writing is not for you

It is to you

Syd is currently a Peace Corps Volunteer serving in the Philippines as a Coastal Resource Manager. She enjoys writing in her free time and hopes to become a journalist. Follow her on Twitter @SydBeaurivage.

Photo by Miguel Bruna on Unsplash.

The Beast Come Round

By J David Cummings

“Everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned.”

—W. B. Yeats, 1919

It is born, it is here, it moves among us,
not as nightmare, the comforts of metaphor,
but in the real of time. Mothers are caged
and raped, girls are raped, children are stolen.
The children die. Close-watched boys are burning
their minds with the faces of guards, the dream of knives…
for the time to come, the time of blood and now.
And I am a silent grave.

On the other side of time, a poet wrote
“magic is afoot, it moves from arm to arm,”
and beautiful losers dreamed sweet forgetting.
What moves here moves by insidious means.
It slaves minds in high office and would-be heroes
in spineless talk, the aggrieved in an ignorance
of mouths, almost the pulse Sieg Heil, Sieg Heil.
And I am a silent grave.

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow…
but tomorrow is drowned. It’s made of infants,
remember? Bereft mothers and chained men.
All the past. Remember? When you knew nothing
except what you dreamed. It’s made of the utter,
consuming dark and the ashes of memory,
the songs of children, light in a lover’s eyes.
And I am a silent grave.

Writers’ Resist published 3 a.m. November 11, 2016 Turtle Cove Cottage Po’ipu, Kau’I, a poem co-written with my wife Christine Holland, in Issue 7: 12, Jan. 2017, and my poem If I Could Write a Political Poem, It Would Say, in Issue 72: 04, Oct. 2018. I have one published collection of poems, Tancho, selected by Alicia Ostriker for the 2013 Richard Snyder Poetry Prize, published by Ashland University Press, Ashland University, Ashland, Ohio. You can follow me on Twitter @jdc99tancho and Facebook.

Photo by Moira Dillon on Unsplash.

Monster’s Lullaby

By Elka Scott

The first time someone called you a monster
you swallowed your own teeth
without chewing
like so many unanswered prayers.
It did not make you more human
but it made silence easier,
made you more acceptable.
You walked into the world without bite
and consumed yourself from the inside out.

The next times this word was uttered
you buried it within yourself
and shed your skin.

If the forest wanted you back you did not show it,
that dark place you came from
impenetrable but by fire.

When their pitchforks pierced your side
you stood still as the moon,
quiet,
waning.
They did not acknowledge your light
but you did,
you had to.

You do not consider it oppression
because it did not hurt enough.
Your scaled and scored skin
had learned to endure by then.
You stuffed your monster deep enough inside
that nothing could beat it out of you

The forest was still dark
but even their fire could not touch it.
It needed a soft touch
like ash over snow
like moonlight on a river

You hid your claws inside your pockets
as you grew, they went with you
longer, sharper, harder.
They became the layers of your soul
telling you that you survived climbing back up the cliffs and the windmills.
You survived
everything that you thought would kill you.
The fire inside you
raged despite the water you shed like leaves

When the forest called your name
you howled back with spit in your teeth
your blood surged but did not boil

When they finally came for you directly
you bared what was left of your teeth against the storm
and stood steady.
You took their blows and did not waver
though it hurt,
it hurt.

You still did not understand why they could not love you
but you did not hate them for it
anymore.
The only fire you wanted was your own,
the slow burn of bitterness had no place under your tongue.
When they finally came for you
you accepted that they may win
but that you,
you were always the one guaranteed sequels,
the one branded invincible by popular vote.
You rose to face each hero
with the knowledge
that your fire
could not be put out.
Your teeth,
swallowed,
never lost their sharp.

Elka Scott writes short, novel-length fiction, and poetry. They watch horror movies with the lights on and obsessively read weird comics. They studied creative writing and psychology in university and are currently working to become a creative writing therapist. Elka lives in Saskatchewan and recently received a grant from the Saskatchewan Arts Board to write their first graphic novel. They are previously published in The Voices Project. Follow Elka on Twitter @elka_scott, Instagram @inkstainedelka, and on Tumblr.

Image from The Public Domain Review.