Tag: Poetry

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 22nd 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 54th & 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.

Floating

By Penny Perry

 

Mother couldn’t have known what to do.
She was only twenty-five,
drove her big sister, Leona, six weeks pregnant
to the doctor’s in L.A.

Leona squinted at California bungalows,
backyards with orange trees.
She thought about her husband home worrying,
her baby waiting for her.

She told my mother about her screenplay,
a murder in the Braille room of the public library.
Then, she sat silent, her long fingers tangled like kelp.

The doctor glanced at his medical license
framed on the wall behind him,
said he was afraid to use ether.
Leona jutted her famous Heyert jaw:
“My friend Ruth told me to insist.
With ether I’ll float above the pain.”

It was hot that June morning, 1942.
No air conditioning. My mother
in the waiting room thumbed through magazines.
Big-eyed Loretta Young on the cover of Life.

It happened fast. Ether, a busy housewife,
pulled down the shades.

The doctor waved my mother in.
White face, head back, Leona was no longer breathing.
The ribbon in her dark hair floated in the breeze of a fan.

 

Penny Perry currently has poems in Earth’s Daughters, Lips, California Quarterly, Patterson Literary Review and the San Diego Poetry Annual. Garden Oak Press will publish my novel, Selling Pencils and Charlie in Spring 2020. “Floating” was previously published in Penny Perry’s poetry collection, Santa Monica Disposal & Salvage (Garden Oak Press, 2012).

Photo credit: Photo by Ava Sol on Unsplash.

At the Funeral of 50 Barefoot Men

By Amirah Al Wassif

 

once upon a time
there was an ancient place
called “Amon” village
that very far spot
where everybody talks
about the river legend
that very far spot
where everybody knows
how to distinguish
the smell of fresh bread
there, at the Amon village
where all the folks live
in their dreams
and the blazing sun cries
against the face of heaven
there, where the poor sweeper
drowns in the colors of the rainbow
and the great brown mountains
announce their upper secrets
to the mass grave
in the Amon village
where everybody talks
about the river legend
and the real tale of
50 barefoot men
in the ancient village
all people are storytellers
and all of them say
the same story
which starts with
once upon a time

there were 100 men
lived together in the same village
but 50 of them were barefoot
and the other 50 had fancy shoes!
50 men sweeping the streets
and 50 men making the bread
50 ones looking for more!
50 shoes in luxury leather
and 50 toes inflamed and cracked

the river recognized the difference
between the shoes and the toes
then it made a good decision
according to nature rules
and the river understood
the difference between
the torn clothing and the perfect ones
then it made a good decision
according to nature rules

on the ragged edge, all the people walk
under the boiling sun
all people talk
and there were two kinds of talking
talking from shoe to shoe
and talking from toe to toe
and the river didn’t love that kind of speech
so, it made a good decision
according to nature rules

50 barefoot men carrying
their empty pots
their facial bones
tell you about long age of bitterly
shabby dresses, fearful eyes
ancient faces full of pimples
much sweat
and shaky hands

50 barefoot men bearing their pain
looking for a way
to protect their feet
from another pain
but the shattered glass
everywhere

the dispossessed people died
and the rest were alive around the river
laughing, jumping, drinking
but the river has a sense of justice
so, it made a good decision
according to the nature rules
and        dried up!

 

Amirah Al Wassif is a freelance writer and author. She has written articles, novels, short stories poems and songs. Five of her books were written in Arabic and many of her English works have been published in various cultural magazines. Amirah is passionate about producing literary works for children, teens and adults that represent cultures from around the world. Her first book, Who Do Not Eat Chocolate was published by Poetic Justice Books, and her latest illustrated book, The Cocoa Book and Other Stories was recently released by Breaking Rules Publishing.

Photo by Sofia Truppel on Unsplash.

People Keep Bothering Me with Details

By Pedro Hoffmeister

 

It’s beginning to snow in Tucson and it’s 65 degrees in Seattle, Washington
in February
But our president says…
He’s tweeting about…

And we should listen to him because he’s the best president we’ve had

this entire year.

That’s a fact. He’s our man. Our leader.

Another fact:
Lori Loughlin, Felicity Huffman, other celebrities have paid money to get their children into some of the most privileged universities, Southern Cal, The Ivies,
where the reported rape rate is higher than at nearby public schools,
Where freshman girls rush sororities, visit fraternities, trip and fall into date-rapists’ arms
But it’s okay
because some of those freshman girls look 13 when they’re 18,
look like
kids

and we all know kids don’t matter – at least not specifically – because there are so many of them.

Try this: Have you ever attempted to think of every single child on earth at the same time?

Exactly.
It’s  too overwhelming             like
trying to name
the name of every celebrity I’ve ever read about.

But children
without names that anyone will learn,
– people keep telling me this –
are in detention centers, Southwest Key in Phoenix, or
Southwest Key in Tucson, or Southwest Key in Youngtown, Arizona
Boring company name – if you ask me,
Boring white vans driving children through boring black gates,
They can do better.

People tell me that a different nameless child is picking the Uzbek cotton that will go into the tongue of my Nike shoes, but the tag on the shoes never says
MADE BY A CHILD’S HANDS
And that stuff is regulated by governments, so this story can’t be true
And anyway
I’m grateful because my kicks will look flawless.

Meanwhile, Asian children (it doesn’t matter where – they all look the same, be honest, they really, really do)
Asian children are wiping
anti-scratch chemicals onto the glass faces of Samsungs, ipads, iphones…
The supervisors in the factories saying something like:

“Dip the rag into the solution, wipe it across the screen, make sure to cover the entire surface, set the glass onto the belt – carefully – don’t touch the front with your grubby fingers. Now dip the rag again…”

These kids are careful – thank God – they care about quality

I’m told
these factories rotate their children every six weeks to let their hands recover from the chemicals – which is nice –
they let the children’s fingerpads and palms heal.
or they replace the children with a new crop – they’re thoughtful about things like that,
like crop rotations to keep our Southern soil healthy.
And I understand that we have to keep the products healthy – that’s what matters – no matter how hard the labor is
Plus, the children are a renewable energy source,

My friend Bill always says, “The dream of America
is a dream of small, willing hands.”

Which is funny

But this evening – all across the United States, and seriously, not funny – we’re watching our people talk about their feelings on The Bachelor
I just feel that…
I’m developing feeling for…
and these feelings are just so…

The thing I love about this show:
No one on this show wastes our time talking about
Authors
Painters
Poets
Activists

They understand that we need to take a break from TOO MUCH THINKING

And this show lets me put myself in The Bachelor’s shoes, stare out at all those women who are available to me

Hannah G., will you accept this rose?

No, actually,
Hannah B. is way skinnier
Ooh, Hannah B. in a bikini…

Hannah B., will you accept this rose?

I’ve noticed that roses on my phone look just as real as the roses in my neighbor’s yard when
I’m looking through my front window,
Realer roses
Truer

I like rose filters,
Which make me think of rose emojis

And emojis remind me of my friend KT who hates emojis – for some stupid reason or another – and doesn’t understand why the emoji movie is so funny
KT,
one of those people who tells me that
Foxconn used Chinese teen interns for 11-hour workdays to produce the iphone X.
Tells me this story twice even after I tell her that
Apple already released a statement that made it clear:
The Chinese teen interns worked voluntarily.

I do like factoids like this:
Professor E.O. Wilson discovered that the collective weight of all ants on earth matches the collective weight of all humans.

He calls the two species symbiotic
somehow
We rise,
we rise,

Like we’ve got diamonds at the meetings
Of our…
Wait, what are the physical characteristics of ants? Or physiological?
Psycho-spiritual?

What I don’t know:
Are ants spiritually and theologically aligned with my religion?

What I do know but I really DON’T care about:
Proceeds from mining for US electronics in the Congo have funded a civil war.

Please don’t tell me about that again
because where even is the Congo? Africa somewhere?

Here’s a question that matters to the people I care about the most:

Are you a part of a meal service, and – if so – which one?

Along with things I don’t care about, there are people I don’t care about as well
Or people I just don’t like
For example:
Stan from IT said something about “Hi-Def drone footage of the fracking fields of Canada” as I was searching music videos on Youtube with my friend at work, Susan.
Susan and I both laughed SO hard.

Stan said:
“What’s the matter?
or better yet,
What else matters?”

And I said to him:
“I matter.
I’m sure I matter.”
Then I looked at Susan and thought of something really smart to say:
“I matter because I know enough about science to be sure that I’m made of matter,
get it?”
Then Susan and I laughed hard again.

But Stan didn’t, and that’s what’s wrong with him. He doesn’t get things.

This is also annoying – and on the same topic:

In my Twitter feed the other day, someone Retweeted:

Is all the matter in the universe finite reconstructive
or infinite dimensional?

 

After publishing books with Penguin, Random House, and Simon & Schuster, Pedro Hoffmeister just self-published a collection of essays titled Confessions of the Last Man on Earth Without a Cell Phone, so he could say anything he wanted to say. No content editors nixing “questionable content.” No publicists’ input on what sells. Just strong personal opinions, satire, and humor.

Amplifier poster art by Chip Thomas, photographer, public artist, activist and physician who has been working between Monument Valley and The Grand Canyon on the Navajo nation since 1987. Enjoy more of his activist and collaborative artwork here and his photography here.

Man with a Knife

By Beth Levine

 

Imagine
that this letter S
floats off the page
becomes a strong
rope
that wraps your hands together behind
your back, like officers do
before putting someone in
the back of a police car.

Imagine
that this letter S floats
off the page and becomes a second
strong rope
one end wraps
around your
left leg
the other hoists you up from
where you are reading this poem so
you are
hanging
upside
down.

Imagine
a man coming toward you
knife in hand
pointing at your throat.
You see
blood on his knife
blood on his hands.
There is no
possible escape.
No one to call on
for help.
No way to free
yourself.
You are
trapped.
Alone.

Imagine
how your heart
desperately races as fast
as a jackhammer and your body shakes
like an off-kilter washing machine,
and you can’t seem to breathe and
helpless tears well-up.

Imagine
how you beg for
your life, for
mercy, but your voice is smaller
than you want it to be,
like when you try to wake
from a scary dream
and you scream, but it is not audible,
not rescuing you
from the nightmare and
you keep pushing the air out
until the sound bursts from your lungs.

Imagine
how the man
keeps coming.
You try
to move him, to
touch his heart, but
his eyes are
vacant and he keeps moving
toward you,
knife in hand.
You wonder how he can be
so cold.
You wouldn’t
ever
ever
do this to another.
You couldn’t
ever
disregard their pleas.

Or could you?

Imagine
bacon.

Imagine
ice cream,
your down comforter,
zoos.

Imagine
your leather shoes,
and eggs.

Imagine
chicken wings.

Now you are the man with the knife.

 

Beth is a psychotherapist and an animals rights activist. She shares her life with two dogs, and enjoys hearing bird songs and being in nature. In her work, whether poetry, art, or both, she helps the marginalized be seen and heard and hopes to contribute to social change by raising awareness.

Photo by Kai Oberhäuser on Unsplash.

Questions for My Shooter

By Abby E. Murray

 

Which of my relatives
will point out how
I was raised humanely,
in a house with a yard
where I could pick
blueberries I grew myself
or sit on a blanket in the grass
when it was warm?
And who will tell them
that’s good because it was,
the humane life, I mean—
how I had constant
opportunities to play
or nest or use my voice,
how I carried myself
into spaces I believed
were beyond assault?
Who will ask whether
the shot was clean,
whether I suffered,
whether I was harvested
responsibly afterward,
my blood stretched far
as a rainy day envelope
or my daughter’s love?
Will the shooting be
diagnosed as a symptom
of Bad Day Disorder
or Disappointment Fever?
Will it be the opposite
of having died in vain?
Sweetheart—may I call you that?
you will, after all,
be the last to change me—
how long will I survive
after we meet?

 

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 by Tim Marshall on Unsplash.

Fine People

By Paul Colton

Based on Martin Niemöller’s confession-turned-poem, “First they came …”

 

First a fine man killed six Sikhs in a Wisconsin temple
but Republicans did not act
because they’re not Sikhs

Then a fine man murdered black worshippers in Charleston
but Republicans did not act
because they’re not black

Then a fine man ran down counter-protestors in Charlottesville
but Republicans did not act
because they’re not lefties

Then a fine man slaughtered 11 Jews praying in Pittsburgh
but Republicans did not act
because they’re not Jews

Then a fine man assassinated Hispanics in an El Paso Walmart
but Republicans will not act decisively
because they’re not Hispanic

Soon fine people will come for pale-skinned moderates
but then it will be too late to stifle
their seething hate and assault rifles

 

Paul Colton has been writing about life’s vagaries for thirty-plus years. His poetry and essays have appeared in more than 75 magazines, literary journals, and poetry anthologies, including The Literary Hatchet, The Satirist, and The Moon magazine.

Photo credit: Christopher Althouse Cohen via a Creative Commons license.

Dear Mitch

By Alicia Cerra Waters

 

My mother found Jesus.
He was on sale at the Walmart
in El Paso.
Mom is on a budget because
no one pays her any money
to play pretend.
When she prays
to the plastic Jesus
with a ninety nine cent sticker
cemented to the back of his robes
at least she means it.

 

Alicia Cerra Waters is a writer and educator. She lives with her husband and son.