Poetry – Page 13 – Writers Resist

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.

Brigade

By Alia Hussain Vancrown

fireflies talk to each other

with light

in some firefly species

only one sex lights up

(but let’s not make that

everything)

in most species

both sexes glow

fireflies produce cold light

two chemicals

are in a firefly’s tail:

luciferase and luciferin

and here the story begins

the root of the lightbringer

Lucifer, commanding men

all over the world

to blackout living things

especially women

a firefly finds its way

inside Dar-ul-Islah

lands on the green curtain

drawn horizontally across

the entire mosque

to separate the pious men

from the pious women

(but let’s not forget

if we were pious

there’d be no need

for forced separation)

from this distance

you can’t tell

the sex of the firefly

I imagine the human brain

emits its own cold light

eating itself

light eating light

in the darkness

when you look at a living thing

you don’t consider binaries

you imitate its light and flash

the dark little by little

the two of you lighthouses

signaling the lost safely ashore

the two of you

tunnel and train

the two of you

astonishment

these are not acceptable

philosophies of the sermon

or the sermonizer

surahs in baritone

imagine Arabic in soprano

it would be a song

it would be Jannat under our mothers’ feet

I could have sworn

the firefly on the green curtain

wouldn’t choose a side

yet there it flits and lifts

well beyond the dome

of the mosque

I could have sworn

the acorns scattered along

the cracks in the stone path

didn’t ask to be crushed

by devout children, their light

made up for them

the dusky husks

of cicadas on leaves

a tinny orchestra of autumn

yet here we are

the world’s music a cacophony

of destruction and softness

in equal parts

but destruction ever louder

would a male god allow

something goddamn else

a male god who gave some of his animals

the ability to create their own light

as a means of survival

I’m telling you if I sit in the back

behind men any longer

sectioned off as sin

the darkness will extinguish me

and I’m not saying

I should have been born a boy

or that I identify as anything other

than a woman warrior

(though why is it so wrong

to be a scattering)

but I’m telling you if I sit

behind these men making

all of the decisions

for every one of us

fireflies are going to charge

out of my mouth

light will cannibalize light

they don’t live long

let this be a warning

Alia Hussain Vancrown has published in journals and magazines in print and online. Her poetry has twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She was selected to participate in Winter Tangerine’s 2018 workshop, Singing Songs Crooning Comets, featuring seminars by Kaveh Akbar and Aricka Foreman. Alia works at the Library of Congress in the Law Division. She currently resides in Maryland. For more, please visit www.aliahussainvancrown.com and Instagram @aliagoestothelibrary.

Photo credit: slgckgc via a Creative Commons license.

To the Twenty-Five Percent of You

By Mark Williams

Consider the time my dad and I took classes at the Exum climbing school in the Tetons, and one of our classmates was Carol Lawrence. Maria of West Side Story Carol Lawrence. Nicest woman you’d ever want to meet, Carol, and who wouldn’t want to meet her, with that voice and pleasant smile and small feet—perfect for Broadway stages and mountain crevices. So when our wiry climbing instructor invited the class to a meeting at a backwoods cabin that night and Carol asked if she could bring her husband “Bob,” as in Camelot’s “If Ever I Would Leave You” Bob, who wouldn’t want to meet Robert Goulet, even if you were more into Neil Young and the Stones. Only when we get to the meeting, neither Carol nor Bob is there. For that matter, besides the instructor, Dad and I are the only ones from our climbing class to show up. There we are, Dad, me, and twelve or fifteen others sitting in uncomfortable chairs in a rustic cabin listening to the wiry instructor talk about actualizing this, shedding that, and something about dynamics. But before he tells us how to actualize or shed or what he means by dynamics, he has an exercise for us to do. “Pair up,” he says.

I’m always hesitant to describe anyone’s physical characteristics in unflattering ways, so let’s just say that my partner, a young man with chestnut, shoulder-length hair and a narrow face, looks like a horse and leave it at that. “Now, for the next thirty minutes, look into each other’s eyes and let your mind go where it goes,” the instructor instructs. Where my mind goes is, he looks like a horse, followed every so often by, don’t start laughing. I’ve read where three-fourths of Trump voters will vote for him even if he shoots them in the middle of Fifth Avenue first. But to the other twenty-five percent of you who went to the cabin in hope of seeing Carol Lawrence and meeting Robert Goulet (so to speak), but now find yourself stuck in an uncomfortable position, when you feel the slightest tap on your shoulder, conscience, or whatever, whether it’s your father tapping or not, listen to him when he says, “Let’s get out of here,” and get out.

Mark Williams’s poems have appeared in The Hudson Review, The Southern Review, New Ohio Review (online), Rattle, Nimrod, The American Journal of Poetry, and the anthology, New Poetry From the Midwest (New American Press). Finishing Line Press published his poem, “Happiness,” as a chapbook in 2015. His poems in response to the Trump administration have appeared in Poets Reading the News, Tuck Magazine, and The New Verse News. This is his second appearance in Writers Resist. He lives in Evansville, Indiana.

Photo by DDP on Unsplash.

No Drone

By Willa Carroll

Willa Carroll is the author of Nerve Chorus, one of Entropy magazine’s Best Poetry Books of 2018 and a SPD Bestseller. A finalist for The Georgia Poetry Prize, she was the winner of Tupelo Quarterly’s TQ7 Poetry Prize and Narrative magazine’s Third Annual Poetry Contest. Her poems have appeared in AGNI, LARB Quarterly Journal, The Rumpus, Tin House, and elsewhere. Video readings of her poems were featured in Narrative Outloud. A former experimental dancer and actor, she has collaborated with numerous artists, including on text-based projects with her filmmaker husband. Willa lives in NYC. Visit her site at willacarroll.com.

How to Eat a Soldier

By Matt Pasca

Lobsters mate for life—on menus they are called lobster.
And all’s fair in fowl: duck called duck, chicken chicken—the winged
as unrenamed as the sea.

But cow & pig & deer, stars of the big screen as Elsie & Babe & Bambi—
we unmammal their meat with abstraction:

Beef. Pork. Venison.

At 19, a man folded his civilian hopes like a flag & placed it
in a box, wrote ME in sharpie across the top. America cheered, called him

Soldier. Corporal. Hero.

At 23, he returned, his flanks braised & mind ground to chuck—
a nightmare pureed so he’d be easier to digest, his potential inconvenient

as a stain, hunkered down between Starbucks, bank vents
& voices in narcotic wind. He’s been renamed:

Veteran. Homeless. Bum.

They spit at his best cardboard sharpie, his camouflage curbside
dolor, another self severed overseas, tranquility amputee

because terror’s meat is never done, named or
broken with bread around family tables, break-time or

ballgames, not at the PTA or Field Day where kids don’t
flinch at fireworks. War clamps down, becomes blood’s

quantity, sight’s tightrope, the cat on 22^nd Street—eyeless &
still—taxis swerving politely now its dead, like the gun

salute he’ll get when they find him one morning, hard as a tank
on 54^th & Lexington. War rapes the “home” inside, America,

so forget the 8,000 beds for your 200,000 bullet-holed, fire-eyed
unstrung children—follow them instead into taverns &

clinics, churches & kitchens filled with humans
waiting for you to remember what they are.

MATT PASCA is a poet, teacher and traveler who believes in art’s ability to foster discovery, empathy and justice. He has authored two poetry collections—A Thousand Doors (2011 Pushcart nominee) and Raven Wire (2017 Eric Hoffer Book Award Finalist)—and serves as Assistant Poetry Editor of 2 Bridges Review. In his corner of New York, Matt facilitates The Sunday Grind, a bi-weekly writing workshop; curates Second Saturdays @Cyrus, a popular poetry series; and spreads his unwavering faith in critical thought and word magic to his Poetry, Mythology and Literature students at Bay Shore High School, where he has taught for 22 years and been named a New York State Teacher of Excellence. Read more at follow him at www.mattpasca.com, @mrpasca (IG), and @Matt_Pasca (T).

Photo credit: Julian Tysoe via a Creative Commons license.

Hope and Furies

By Shana Ross

When vengeance descends
in a collective
noun with feathers:
do we expect
a murmuration
or a murder?

Shana Ross is a writer, mother, muse, sometime wallflower, middle-aged ambivert with a BA and MBA from Yale. Since resuming her writing career in 2018, she has accumulated over 20 publication credits. She is a 2019 Parent-Writer Fellow of Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, and is an editor for Luna Station Quarterly. She does not fully understand why women are not rioting, right now.

Painting, Orestes Pursued by the Furies, by William-Adolphe Bouguereau, 1862.

For Four Years, At Least

By Mark J. Mitchell

For Lyle Grosjean and those of us who walk

None shall kill when all are completed.

—Kenneth Patchen

Our boots—
brown, heavy and clunky
as gray cinderblocks—
can rest at the backs
of our cluttered closets unless
bright wild flower hills
call us by name.

The green room—
new, shiny, its long table
still wrapped in clear plastic—
will stay empty. No pink
flesh will feel the bite
of silver needles. The window
will be blurred by dust. No one
need witness human sacrifice.

We will not walk
across the red bridge
on blue mornings except
to share quiet joy in each
the other’s company, watching the white
city and the green hills—
our walks yellow and bright
as summer.

For four years, at least,
the machinery of death
will be left to rust.

Mark J. Mitchell’s novel, The Magic War, appeared from Loose Leaves Publishing. He studied at Santa Cruz under Raymond Carver and George Hitchcock. His work has appeared in several anthologies and hundreds of periodicals. He lives with his wife, Joan Juster, making his living pointing out pretty things in San Francisco. Since 1978, he has walked from San Francisco to San Quentin, with a likeminded group, each time an execution has been scheduled.

Photo by Tanya Nevidoma on Unsplash.

Apartheid

By Rebecca Ruth Gould

“We don’t serve Arabs,”
says the man behind the counter.
He fixes his eyes on me &
awaits my consent.

My Arab taxi driver is unfazed.
Racism is an old story
in the land of David.
Politeness took over.

We head for the car.
The road is a silent witness to atrocity.
Barren valleys cascade,
one after another.

God is a strange creature,
I think to myself.
What idiot would choose this sterile land
for launching his career?

We reach Bethlehem: checkpoint 300.
I disembark.
Arabs are not allowed
to cross like white women

with American passports.
I journey by foot to the two-storied
white limestone home where
I’ve taken up abode.

I pass tourists in t-shirts,
Banksy portraits,
& soldiers armed with kalashnikovs.
Like the racist at the counter—

like every well-heeled politician—
like every international law—
armed soldiers avert their gaze,
revealing glare of the sun.

Rebecca Ruth Gould’s poems and translations have appeared in Nimrod, Kenyon Review, Tin House, The Hudson Review, Salt Hill, and The Atlantic Review. She translates from Persian, Russian, and Georgian, and has translated books such as After Tomorrow the Days Disappear: Ghazals and Other Poems of Hasan Sijzi of Delhi (Northwestern University Press, 2016) and The Death of Bagrat Zakharych and Other Stories by Vazha-Pshavela (Paper & Ink, 2019). Her literary translations have earned comparison with the world’s greatest poets, with a reviewer in The Calvert Journal recently noting, “With her new translation, Rebecca Ruth Gould follows in the footsteps of Russian literature luminaries like Osip Mandelshtam and Marina Tsvetaeva.” Her poem “Grocery Shopping” was a finalist for the Luminaire Award for Best Poetry in 2017, and she is a Pushcart Prize nominee.

West Bank mural photo by Dan Meyers on Unsplash, 2014.

Dan’s note: This was done by Banksy, which I didn’t learn until a couple years later. I paid a Palestinian cab driver to take me to their side of the wall and took a few photos of the “graffiti”/art with my iPhone. The West Bank is walled off like a prison and heavily guarded by the Israelis. For those reasons, of all the “graffiti” I saw, this one resonated the most with me. I hope this pic introduces others to this amazing piece of art or gives some context to those who have seen it before.

Passion Play

By Jose A. Alcantara

The men in white collars
worship the crucified Christ

or what passes for it –
a soft-fleshed boy on a bed

stripped naked,
arms spread, ankles crossed.

They shoot polaroids
to share with other men

of God, those not lucky
enough to be there

that day, on Golgotha,
when the innocent wept

and even thieves
begged forgiveness.

Jose A. Alcantara has worked as a bookseller, mailman, commercial fisherman, baker, carpenter, studio photographer, door-to-door salesman, and math teacher. He is a former Fishtrap Fellow and was the winner of the 2017 Patricia Bibby Memorial Scholarship from Tebot Bach. His poems have appeared in Poetry Daily, The Southern Review, Spillway, Rattle, High Desert Journal, San Pedro River Review, Pilgrimage, Spoon River Poetry Review, and the anthologies, 99 Poems for the 99%, and America, We Call Your Name: Poems of Resistance and Resilience. His poetry has been nominated for both a Pushcart and Best of the Net.

Photo credit: Photo by lAI mAN nUNG on Unsplash.

On the President’s Announcement of Our Hashtag

By John Linstrom

The President announced we need to keep
some carbon in the ground; he sounded sure,

his raised and lowered index finger maybe
mimicking an oil rig I’ve seen

on my computer screen. I caught his talk
distilled at first, a single image meme,

hashtagged to my cell phone’s glowing face,
the floating phantom of a president

in light above this tiny glowing slab.
Such phones are made of matter. I forget

sometimes the way the world is swept for me,
the oil that forms the plastic, metals heaved

from mines, and heavy metals concentrated
to this short-term task. I hold it here—

the screen dims—it reminds me of the black
obsidian we’d often find in flakes

along the old ravine. We pretended
that was magic, too, but we really knew

it made the body of the place we played,
the mud’s black fingernails, skeletal

outcropped source of grounded mystic wonder.
That stone had been there for millennia.

Then we’d each lift a rock and toss it up
into the clicking branches, watch it fall

gleaming along a trail the trees had altered,
and catch it in our shirt-sleeve-guarded hands.

Later, we’d return the stones to the mud.
The soul of Earth is black like that, I think,

obsidian and coal and oil, the bridges
from molten core to surface, dinosaurs

to us. We listen to our President
on magic flakes we’ve swept from earth’s ravines.

The flakes can prophesy to how we’ve made
an end to all we’ll ever dream to make—

a human listening to the soil’s voice
might speak of moderation, or of love.

#KeepItInTheGround

Poet’s note: Written on the occasion of President Barack Obama’s rejection of the Keystone XL Pipeline, November 2015.

John Linstrom’s poems have recently appeared in Commonweal Magazine, Bridge Eight, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Dunes Review, and Narrative Northeast’s “Eco Issue.” In 2015, Counterpoint Press published his centennial edition of Liberty Hyde Bailey’s eco-philosophical manifesto, The Holy Earth, with a new foreword by Wendell Berry. He now has a collection of Bailey’s garden writings, The Liberty Hyde Bailey Gardener’s Companion, forthcoming from Cornell University Press in the fall. John currently lives with his fiancée in Brooklyn, where he is a doctoral candidate in English and American Literature at New York University, and he also holds an MFA in Creative Writing and Environment from Iowa State University. Visit him on Twitter and Instagram @JohnLinstrom, at his website at johnlinstrom.com, and on Facebook.

“On the President’s Announcement of Our Hashtag” was previously publish by This Week in Poetry.

Photo credit: Photo by Zbynek Burival on Unsplash.

Street Folk

By Ellen Girardeau Kempler

Disembodied. Disenfranchised. Disconnected. Disassociated. Disowned. Disliked.

Distained. Disrespected. Disregarded. Disparaged. Disgraced. Dismissed.

Discarded. Disavowed. Disqualified. Disappointed. Disheartened. Distanced. Disbarred.

Dislocated to:

Dis City,

The Inferno,

Sixth Circle of Hell,

Not in My Backyard,

Planet Earth 00000

(Do not forward. Do not return.) Disappeared.

Called “a timely and powerful selection of climate poetics,” Ellen Girardeau Kempler’s first book, Thirty Views of a Changing World: Haiku + Photos, was published in December 2017 by Finishing Line Press. In 2016, she won Ireland’s Blackwater International Poetry Prize and received honorable mention in Winning Writers’ Tom Howard/Margaret Reid Poetry Contest. She posts a daily haiku and photo “anti-selfie” on Instagram @placepoet, you can follow her on Twitter @goodnewsmuse, and she publishes a newsletter called Tiny Letters.

Photo credit: Photo by Fred Pixlab on Unsplash.

The President Signs the Criminal Justice Reform Act

By Jack Mackey

In the Oval Office dripping in rehearsed applause
from the full-pocketed and the bloated
paid to do a job by corporate wardens enriched
by a three-strike law that scooped up traffic
violators like escaped farm animals

surrounded by billionaire brothers who bought
a conscience on closeout after years of dictating to
lap dog stenographers in the Capitol their wishes
placing innocents into the jaws of a meat grinder

smoothing silk tie with one hand he grins
and turns with camera-ready graciousness to his left
to his right cloaks himself in the mantle of
unearned praise halfway extends his barely average
hands to his greedy kin who get credit for
finally noticing injustice now
because it nested in their family patch

he moves the pen up and down with theatrical force
forging a scribbled signature turning his name towards
the cameras like a child with a finger painting.

I watch this revival-tent duplicity on my TV
wondering, how do we mend a wingless sparrow how
do we put a daddy’s push on the seat of a girl’s swing how
do we place a mother’s palm on a boy’s delicate
fingers guiding as he practices his letters.

How will a new law fix a bad law, return
the confiscated lift all the clothes and furniture
evicted to the curb and fly them back inside the house?

Jack Mackey lives in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, and Washington, D.C. He holds an M.A. in English from the University of Maryland. His poems have been published by, or forthcoming in, Darkhouse Books, the Rehoboth Beach Writers’ Guild, Third Wednesday and Rat’s Ass Review.

Photo credit: From the ACLU website.

Coat Hanger Song

By Andrea England

The baby born into a subway toilet

between Harvard and Porter

Baby

with the too-big head and ears

that flap in the wind from a smack

Baby addicted to crack turned

blue as a bruise in his birthday suit

Baby unwanted and doesn’t know why

His father raped his mother

Baby taken

and fostered and fostered and

jailed for no crime of his own

Baby who commits suicide at nine

with a needle spooned from the shelter

of homelessness

Baby hit by the hunger of

water just to be wet

Black baby White

baby

Baby nursed by wolves or cats

Baby who killed his mother and

died anyway in the NICU of broken

hearts or the

Baby kept in a shed of his own

milk and blood

Beaten like a drum, in the back

alley of our glorious forsaken nation.

Andrea England is the author of Other Geographies (2017, Creative Justice Press) and Inventory of a Field (2014, Finishing Line Press). Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Potomac Review, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Fourteen Hills Review, and others.. Most recently she had the honor of being a Writer-in-Residence at Firefly Farms (SAFTA). She lives and works in Kalamazoo Michigan, where she teaches English and Creative Writing for various universities and organizations. To learn and read more about her and her work, visit andreajengland.com.

Photo credit: Photo by Palash Jain on Unsplash.

Dark Spaces

By Heather Mydosh

For Indiana HEA 1337

Eve is a common punch line
in the joke against women
with her penchant for the forked tongue
and listening to more than one
authority figure, but if we
peel it back a little further
to rectilinear Pandora, bless her,
created first among women
by temperamental adolescent gods,
she had it even worse—at least Eve
knew what the apple looked like,
could touch it, fingertip trace its cheeks
and test for firmness. Fondling wouldn’t
have done Eve in, but all Pandora
had to do was crack her box
for the proverbial peak.
She couldn’t have known
what was in there, what could take root
in the world outside herself.
If she could have known,
of course she wouldn’t have
opened it and damned herself
to a notoriety which outstrips her gods.
Still we punish women who look
inside themselves to see
what seeds we bear, what traits,
what crooked stems and strains,
and we damn with new laws
those who slam the lid back down
and seal up in their cups and vessels
that which they will not tend and grow.

Heather Mydosh is a professor at Independence Community College in southeast Kansas and a recent graduate of the Stonecoast MFA at the University of Southern Maine. Her work has appeared in The Midwest Quarterly, After the Pause, 99 Pine Street, The Corvus Review, and Kansas Time + Place among others. Visit Heather’s website to learn more.

Painting credit: From the 1951 film Pandora and the Flying Dutchman.