Poetry – Page 18 – Writers Resist

Sudan

By Carolyn Welch

The last white male rhino is dying. What
among us is meek? The largest?

The trophy sized slow moving giants
whose downfall is simply a matter of

being trophy sized and slow?
Scientist ready to rush in with swabs and

test tubes to save cells, hair, semen.
The stock market, however, is fine,

our precious blinders intact and well.
Tonight we build a fire, not

because we need fire or heat or light.
We watch flames struggle, nurse them

against the odds, until they devour
our wooden offerings. A bit of heat.

A little light. The rhinoceros quieting
half a world away.

Sudan, the last male white rhinoceros, died at the Dvur Kralove Zoo in Czech Republic March 19, 2018. Extinction attributed entirely to human activity.

Carolyn Welch worked for many years as a pediatric intensive care nurse and currently works as a family nurse practitioner. Carolyn’s poetry and fiction have appeared in Gulf Coast, Poet Lore, Sundog, Tar River Poetry, Conduit, Connecticut River Review, High Desert Journal, The Southeast Review, Zone 3, The Minnesota Review, American Journal of Nursing and other literary journals. Her poem “Rain Run” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her poetry collection, The Garden of Fragile Beings, was published October 2018 by Finishing Line Press. She has an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars, and lives in Tennessee with her husband, children and three spoiled rescue dogs.

Photo credit: Laura Bernhardt via a Creative Commons license.

Shot Three Times

By Karly Noelle White

I think often of the musician,
I forget his name,
who drove home from a gig one night,

his elderly van coughed up smoke,
was braked to the shoulder,
he called for a ride and he waited.

Just standing by the side of the road,
humming a worship tune he had led
that past Sunday; God is great, God is good.

The flashing red and blue;
police pulling up with grim faces.
“Help is on the way,” he told them.
But they took one look and agreed

this guy fit the profile––they turned over his gear,
disassembled the drum kit,
but found no stash or secrets.

His hands were flat against his legs,
he knew the drill. He complied and complied.
But their body cams went dark.
He died.
Shot three times.

Another man; with the same slender build,
sang the same sort of songs,
drove to the same sort of gigs
in the same sort of van,

And then of course, there’s his skin:
the color, my husband refers to as mocha,
warm and inviting,
a sharp contrast to my cream.

I burrow into my husband’s arms,
he assures me that he is not afraid.
But I can’t stop hearing the bullets fly,
the musician’s widow’s cries.

Karly Noelle White is an author, copywriter, and editor. Her work has been featured in the award-winning anthologies Lines of Velocity, Untangled, Nothing Held Back and Pieces of Me, all by WriteGirl Publications. She is a proud wife and mother and nurses a tea addiction. She earned her degree in English Literature at Biola University and cares a lot about faith, justice, literature, equality, education and Batman. She can be found online at Mrs. White in the Library and on Facebook.

Photo credit: Infrogmation of New Orleans via a Creative Commons license.

Philomela in the Rooms (2017)

By Michelle M. Tokarczyk

Where we listen.
Each day is a hand opening possibilities.
Each story is a nugget of success, or
a remnant of lost days and broken bonds.
Reminding us the straight and narrow
is wide enough to support us.
Hold us firm against the cravings
that still salivate in our mouths.

Where we listen.
Until a woman’s voice cracks
the way that truth cracks secrets and lies
and all the walls that still, we build.
“_____ ____ ____ raped me.”

We listen. Picture
the man holding more
power than we can picture. Look
at the woman I do not know but know
she is trying to recover. Staring
at the space here her words hang. Powerless.

And we, women, listen, crossing our arms
across our chests as if we’re afraid
they’ll crack open and our own hearts
will spill out.

We will listen, but not speak.
We are powerless. We can do nothing.
Not now.
Not yet.
We will never forget.

Michelle M. Tokarczyk has published two books of poetry Bronx Migrations and The House I’m Running From; as well as work in numerous journals and anthologies including the minnesota review, The Literary Review, Slant and For a Living: The Poetry of Work. A professor of English at Goucher College, she divides her time between Baltimore and New York City, and spends as much time as possible in resistance work.

Image: Tereus Severing Philomela’s Tongue, Virgil Solis 1562

Some Facts for This Moment

By Shana Ross

Not only is man far from the only animal to use tools, some birds have even been observed making and using prosthetics—mostly artificial legs, after losing them to predators, sometimes in botched attempts to save a nest and fledglings, but one ostrich was observed replacing its wing even though it could obviously not fly.

Pluto is highly unstable and will likely fracture itself in a geologically near future. This, of course, is one of the main reasons its planetary status was revoked, even though scientists deny any such bias based on unpredictability and fragility.

Despite popular mythology having Joan of Arc cropping her hair short like a boy’s, she actually invented the French twist, later popularized by Grace Kelly, whose marriage into the Monaco monarchy gained her ownership of the castle where Joan’s mortal remains were interred. Some of them.

Squirrels only hide nuts in caches of odd numbers. They feel great about their prospects for the winter, but many will die before spring.

One of the great pyramids is sinking, slowly but surely, and it is illegal under Egyptian law to photograph the now obvious difference. Older images hid the discrepancy with perspective and unusual angles.

In upper Scandinavia, where the sun sets for a fortnight over solstice, reindeer faint at first light each year. One myth casts this as relief that the sun has returned, but scientific study finds that the endocrinology is identical to that of the beasts’ reaction to very large bears and repeated sonic booms, so they are certain it is pure fear.

Debussy was colorblind. Ironically, he tends to be a favorite of synesthetes, particularly his nocturnes. I have been known to cry, seeing what he fumbled into.

Shana Ross is a poet and playwright with an MBA. She lives in Connecticut and works globally as a consultant and leadership expert. This decade, her work has been published in Anapest Journal.

Image credit: Carl Glover via a Creative Commons license.

This poem was previously published by SHANTIH Journal.

America

By Asante Keron Hamid

Picking and choosing what to
keep and what to crop.

Pick of the litter. Pick
of the cotton. No
Afro picks. No
cornrows.

Three-fifths out of the photograph
and one stanza too censored for an
epitaph and one bullet too deceased
for the polygraph to detect our truth.

Blue in black water and white up
brown nostril and white on black
chalkboard and nappy hair knotted
into spiritual song. Strum along:

We will not die, USA.
P.S.A: We can’t die.
Shackles, whips, chains,
tar and feather, names —
We won’t die, USA.

Asante Keron Hamid is a poet / writer born and raised in Brooklyn, NY. His work can be found in The Ibis Head Review, Dissident Voice, and Tuck Magazine among other publications, and he can be found on Instagram @asante.avenida.

Photo credit: USDA NRCS Texas via a Creative Commons license.

Post-Election

By Anna DiMartino

Tonight, we’ll eat salad–
it’s all I can handle.

Under water, I try
to rinse the dirt
from the lettuce.
No matter how careful,
I always manage to miss
a little bit of grit.
Without fail, it turns up
in that last bite.

But not tonight.

One by one,
I tear each leaf
from the core,
inspect every pucker.

When I reach the heart,
I startle. There, lurking
in the fold, a paper wasp,
still, except for the twitch
of its venomous stinger.

Anna DiMartino’s work has appeared in The Atlanta Review, Lake Effect, Whale Road Review, The Cancer Poetry Project 2: A Year in Ink (San Diego Writers, Ink Anthology), Serving House Journal, and in the book Steve Kowit: This Unspeakably Marvelous Life, and Slipstream. Her website is www.annaodimartino.com.

Clowns

By Mark Williams

Anytime Giuliani talks on television the words “available
for birthdays” should flash beneath him on the screen.
– Paula Poundstone

Dear Paula,

Are you sure you thought this through? I mean,
it’s possible some kid’s mom might just call, thinking,
Once a great man, always a great man. And who’s to say
that kid doesn’t have a friend who’s coulrophobic: afraid
of guys like Rudy. A wiener dog blew up in the friend’s face,
and now he walks into the party and there’s Rudy
with that sneer of his, twisting a balloon like it’s the truth.
Only now we know a balloon isn’t always a balloon.
In the mouths of some, a balloon is an elephant, a butterfly
or swan. And speaking of elephants, you probably know
the idea of sending in clowns started with the circus.
A beautiful flying trapeze artist falls to the sawdust
and the cry, “Send in the clowns!” fills the Big Top.
Then the clowns come in, and they’re so busy squirting
giant flowers and squeezing into tiny cars
that we forget the trapeze artist is no longer flying—
or beautiful. As you’re no doubt aware,
Stephen Sondheim wrote “Send in the Clowns”
for Desiree Armfeldt (played by Glynis Johns) to sing
in Act Two of the 1973 musical, A Little Night Music.
Rejected by her lover, Fredrik, Desiree sings,

Where are the clowns?
There ought to be clowns …

But as for calling Rudy and sending in his friends, Paula,

Don’t bother, they’re here.

Mark Williams’ writing has appeared in The Hudson Review, Indiana Review, Rattle, Nimrod, The American Journal of Poetry, Poets Reading the News, New Ohio Review (online) and the anthologies, New Poetry from the Midwest and American Fiction. His poem, “Carrying On,” will appear in The Southern Review this fall. He carries on in Evansville, Indiana, where he wishes balloons, not animals, were used at the annual Thanksgiving circus.

Image from the original Broadway show.

Remodeling the kitchen won’t expand your mind

By Ying Choon Wu

My fellow law-abiding citizens –
as we steer our carts
through Costco and Walmart
and Target and Best Buy,
let us remember this:
We are somewhere.
Inside our shoes.
Between the cans of soup
and bags of noodles.
Between crossing off sanitizer
and searching for arugula.
Between the chill of dawn
and the cool of night.
Between apex and nadir.
Between the arc of the sky
and our parking spots.

We are more than 7 billion in the world.
Each one of us is somewhere.
The bones of our forefathers are somewhere.
Our baby bonnet buttons,
the old TVs we forsook for flat screens,
the prizes from our Happy Meals – are somewhere.

My law-abiding brothers and sisters,
as we dream frontiers from our cul-de-sacs,
and pull the crab grass,
and whiten our teeth,
I ask of you this: Touch your navel.
We came into life through connection.
Feel the soles of your feet –
We are somewhere.
We are here.

Ying Wu is a poet and cognitive neuroscientist who studies insight and creativity. She hosts San Diego’s Gelato Poetry Series (www.meetup.com/BrokenAnchorPoetry/) and is part of the organizational team for the Kids! San Diego Poetry Annual. She embraces poetry as a medium for creating community and connecting people. Her work has been featured in Serving House Journal, Synesthesia Anthology, Blue Heron Review, The San Diego Poetry Annual, The Poetry Superhighway, and The Clackamas Literary Review, and is on display at the San Diego Airport. She is a recipient of an Oregon Literary Fellowship, and was awarded honorable mention in the 2017 Kowit poetry competition. She lives in the San Diego Bay on a sailing catamaran with her husband and daughter.

Photo credit: Polycart via a Creative Commons license.

This poem previously appeared in the Clackamas Literary Review.

Elegy

By Bänoo Zan

For Jamal Khashoggi

I am Allah—
Al-Rahman[1]—
Al-Rahim[2]—

banished from
faith
and love

mourning—

beauty—
my Word—

censored—

I am mourning
my death—

The robe
of my Kaaba
stained with blood
of free speech

I have witnessed
Terror—

my sons beheaded
my daughters
deprived of light

I am Allah—
Beloved of
bards and prophets
Idol of rebels and Sufis

fleeing from
custodians
who desecrate
my house of
refuge

My body dismembered—
scattered over the woods—
I am seeking hearts
to take me in

They have stamped me
on their crown—
used me as cheap gold—

Bleeding
I wonder
if I will survive

Free me—

Free Allah
from despots

Free yourself
from fear

Let me live—

apostate infidel that I am—

At times like this—
with watan[3]
soaked in worshippers’ blood—

with faith soiled
and values sold—

which god do you worship?

Bänoo Zan has numerous published poems and poetry related pieces (over 170) as well as three books. Songs of Exile, her first poetry collection, was shortlisted for Gerald Lampert Award by the League of Canadian Poets. Letters to My Father, her second poetry book, was released in 2017. She is the founder of Shab-e She’r (Poetry Night), Toronto’s most diverse and brave poetry reading and open mic series (inception: November 2012). Follow the poet on Facebook, Twitter @BanooZan, and Instagram.

Photo credit: TMAB2003 via a Creative Commons license.

This poem was previously published in Dissident Voice.

[1] Gracious, compassionate
[2] Merciful
[3] Homeland

Citizens United to Make Oz Great Again

By Nancy Austin

When the Supreme Rulers lifted limits on campaign contributions,
The wind began to switch, the House, to pitch,
and the Senate, fat on fundraising festivities.
Wizards and witches from east to west, north to south
could now hide behind curtains, throw balls of fire,
send flying monkeys, flaunt crystal balls.

Oz TV buzzed with slogans as candidates paired with PACs.
Almira Gulch with Western Witches for Oil,
I’ll get you my pretty, and your little dog too.
Lion with Independents for Advancing Education,
Elephants, donkeys and me, oh my.
Scarecrow avoided all PAC’s and was branded
If I only had a brain.

Dorothy snagged The International Landscapers,
Look no further than your own backyard,
and the Realtors Network, There’s no place like home,
and almost took it, but the Wizard was backed
by Foreign Flying Monkeys, whose slogan,
Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain,
was lost on the newly courageous heartless and brainless.
Now, there is liberty and justice for all
(very bad wizards).

Text in italics from or adapted from Wizard of OZ. Director Victor Fleming. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc., 1939.

Nancy Austin was born in Whitefish Bay, WI, but has lived on both coasts and points in between. She holds a master of science in psychology, ran a community support program for individuals with mental illness in Green Bay, and retired early to move to the northwoods. She relishes time to write in between operating an unofficial bed and breakfast on Bear Lake, for her family and friends. Austin’s work has appeared in journals such as Adanna, Ariel, Midwestern Gothic, Portage Magazine, Sheepshead Review, Verse Wisconsin and the Wisconsin Poets Calendars. She has a poetry collection titled Remnants of Warmth (Aldrich Press/Kelsay Books, 2016).

Image credit: Mark Rain via a Creative Commons license.

Goddammit, you gotta vote because

By Tara Campbell

when hate comes marching into town
it bashes streetlights left and right
incited by a raving clown.

They’ll yank the phone- and power lines down
to shock and choke us in the night
when hate comes marching into town.

We’ll stand together—black, white, brown
queer, Muslim, Jew—against the blight
incited by a raving clown.

When angry men fling fists around
we’ll arm the women (impolite!)
when hate comes marching into town,

and we’ll sing loud enough to drown
them out, when they shout all their shite
incited by a raving clown.

But only votes retake the ground,
rebuild, and reignite the lights
when hate comes marching into town
incited by a raving clown.

Tara Campbell (www.taracampbell.com) is a Kimbilio Fellow, a fiction editor at Barrelhouse, and an MFA candidate at American University. Prior publication credits include SmokeLong Quarterly, Masters Review, Jellyfish Review, Booth, and Strange Horizons. Her novel, TreeVolution, was published in 2016, followed in 2018 by Circe’s Bicycle. Her third book, a short story collection called Midnight at the Organporium, will be released by Aqueduct Press in 2019.

Takes the Cake

By Karen Greenbaum-Maya

“I was sitting at the table, we had finished dinner,” T***p told Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo. “We’re now having dessert—and we had the most beautiful piece of chocolate cake that you’ve ever seen—and President Xi was enjoying it.”

So many problems are being solved by chocolate cake. Beautiful cakes, perfect 10s, are being sent to NATO heads of state. The ones that came out kind of flat, the 6s and the 4s, are being used to bomb Syria. And Iraq, too, why not? Now we are waging war with chocolate cake. Surplus wheat, butter, eggs, sugar, all so much cheaper than ordnance. Only the chocolate is imported. Cakes are raining down on Assad’s wasted cities, bringing comfort to displaced people everywhere. No blasted hospitals, no amputations. A little gut maybe, but hey. People everywhere are happy to see American planes releasing materiel. To be struck by a falling chocolate cake, no worse than getting slapped by flung custard pie. In Korea, chocolate is considered a medicine. Like the healing that chocoholics dream from Death by Chocolate. Cakes are being launched, pushing Kim Jong-Un’s nuclear buttons, showing how good it tastes to choose butter over guns. Let them eat cake.

Karen Greenbaum-Maya, retired clinical psychologist, German major, two-time Pushcart nominee and occasional photographer, no longer lives for Art but still thinks about it a lot. Her work has appeared in journals and anthologies including B O D Y, Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, Comstock Poetry Review, Off the Coast, Otoliths, Naugatuck Poetry Review, and Measure. Kattywompus Press published her two chapbooks, Burrowing Song and Eggs Satori. Kelsay Books published her book-length collection, The Book of Knots and their Untying. She has been politically engaged since she was 12. She co-hosts Fourth Sundays, a poetry series in Claremont, California. For links to work online, go to: www.cloudslikemountains.blogspot.com/.

Image: Internet meme.

24-Hour Relevance

By Larry D. Thacker

You’ve got twenty-four hours to wring out the story.
Maybe not that even. Something shinier could surface

out of that early morning Twitter abyss, from so deep
and lightless the thing might be unrecognizable

but for its stench of current interest, eyeless,
translucent hide capable of handling the depth pressures

that crush lesser beings, angler decoyed skin oddities
feeling into the murk as lures for the cycle hungry,

clueless creatures convinced they live to feed
the larger monsters, the leviathans never bothering

to ask such petty questions where no sound travels.

Larry D. Thacker’s poetry can be found in more than a hundred publications, including, Poets Reading the News, American Journal of Poetry, Poetry South, Spillway, Tower Poetry Society, Mad River Review, Mojave River Review, Town Creek Poetry, and Appalachian Heritage. His books include Mountain Mysteries: The Mystic Traditions of Appalachia and the poetry books, Voice Hunting, Memory Train, and Drifting in Awe. His MFA in poetry and fiction is earned from West Virginia Wesleyan College. Visit his website at www.larrydthacker.com.

Photo credit: Robert Couse-Baker via a Creative Commons license.

I Sing What I’ve Seen

By M.A. Durand

I sing of chickens being eaten. Every. Single. One. In the rooms. Someone paid. The price high. The bodies cheap. I sob you do not want to be there. What I sing is what I have heard and seen. My eyes and ears are old they see and hear young Black bodies under shotgun guard in sugar cane fields. My eyes see young bodies of all colors on school room floors. In homes. In streets. And you don’t want to see, but you should see the bullets the blood the bodies. Slavery to AR-15. Hear and See. Hear and See freedom ring.

M.A. Durand is an undergraduate student just three credits from earning a BA at Antioch University in Creative Writing with a Concentration in Literature. She lives in the Mojave Desert, in Barstow, California, has traveled overseas and lived in Cairo, Egypt, and began writing stories at age seven.

Photo credit: James Emery via a Creative Commons license.

Hysteria

By Daryl Sznyter

in the 1800s we were banned
from riding trains        because it was thought
our uteruses would fly            away
as though that should scare us
as though some           small    part of us
didn’t want that           all along
as though our wombs
weren’t tiny saucers                from the beginning
of time             sick of scientists
using the same breath
to call our names & warn the others
as if the others                         would listen
as if     curiosity          and lust
could be separated
& we wouldn’t respond
with the creation         of a more efficient
form of            transportation

Daryl Sznyter is a Pushcart Prize-nominated poet and content writer from Northeast Pennsylvania. She received her MFA in Poetry from The New School and is the author of the poetry collection Synonyms for (Other) Bodies (NYQ Books). Her work has appeared in Phoebe, Gravel, Cleaver Magazine, The American Journal of Poetry, Poet Lore, WomenArts Quarterly, and elsewhere. To learn more, please visit darylsznyter.com.

Image credit: an illustration from Dr. Hollick’s Complete Works: Diseases of Male and Female Generative Organs, Marriage Guide, The Matron’s Manual of Midwifery and Child Birth, and The Diseases of Women Familiarly Explained, published in 1902

Feeding the Fire of Winter Solstice

By Cate Gable

One stick one stick one match
one fist of newsprint
and the future is set
into flames. Passion and idiocy
are alight in the trees,
the possums are playing
dead, civil traditions
melt.

Our bones are reversing themselves
one flake at a time, and the temple
of our beloveds has long been
desecrated for pennies.
Our soul-mates the bears,
the deer, whales,
elephants, manatees
have withered

into oblivion. We watched
them go, everything
in slow-motion, so slow
we felt nothing, the needle
barely into our flesh
when the long-forgetting
began—our ancestors.
shadows on the wall,

never spoke,
or if they did, muttering
nonsense, we smote them
from the record. Words
were brands, random
tattoos on our arms,
over our hearts,
the smell of smoke
on our clothes.

Cate Gable has an MFA in poetry from Pacific Lutheran University; an MA from the University of WA; and a BA from University of Pennsylvania, graduating magna cum laude. Gable won first place in San Francisco’s Bay Guardian poetry contest; she has an award-winning chapbook, “Heart;” and a book of poetry and commentary on Stein/Toklas, entitled Chere Alice: Three Lives, (launched as part of the UC Berkeley, Bancroft Library, “A Place at the Table” exhibit). Her poem “Kilauea” was selected for Aloha Shorts Radio. Gable lives in Nahcotta, WA; Paris, France; and winters in Oracle, AZ.

Photo credit: Mendolus Shank via a Creative Commons license.

Heads on the Chopping Block

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

Donald Trump, Brett Kavanaugh,
Mitch McConnell, Chuck Grassley,
Lindsey Graham and all other D.C. misogynists:

Beware.

You think Medusa was a monster?

Politics hath no fury

like a sexual assault survivor scorned

mocked, belittled, lied about,

ignored.

Our rage is beautiful and terrifying.

Our votes will turn you

not to stone

but to rubble.

A GOTV note from K-B: If you don’t like what’s happening in our country, let your voice be heard—at the polls. The midterm elections are Tuesday 06 November.

Your vote does count, particularly this year. It’s OK to be sorrowful, angry, frustrated, enraged, but don’t let that stop you from voting. Today, casting your vote is a dire responsibility.

If you’re not registered, or not sure, the deadline in some states is soon, but you can look up your state at this link (https://www.headcount.org/deadlines-dates/).

If you’re unsure of your polling place (they sometimes change election to election), you can look it up via this link (https://www.nass.org/can-i-vote/find-your-polling-place).

Whether online, by mail or in person, we must GET OUT THE VOTE.

Kit-Bacon Gressitt, publisher of Writers Resist and a co-founding editor, is an award-winning writer, an editor, and a Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies lecturer. Her work can be found in Not My President: The Anthology of Dissent, Ducts, Trivia: Feminist Voices, The Missing Slate, Evening Street Review, Publisher’s Weekly, San Diego Poetry Annual, and Chiron Review, among others. A former feminist newspaper columnist in a conservative bastion, K-B has learned to duck swiftly. Her website is at www.kbgressitt.com.

This image is a satirical adaptation by artist Kim Kinman of sculptor Luciano Garbati’s “Medusa With Perseus’ Head.”

If I Could Write a Political Poem, It Would Say

By J. David Cummings

Are we fast becoming Nazi Germany?
Tune in, not tomorrow, but later today.

Let me confess to you my naïveté:
I thought the good among us were many.

Now I fear we stumble, prayer-like, as if to our last breath:
O, Dark Angel, afflict him who is the Anti-Savior.

Everyone can smell the smell of rancid death.
Everyone seems stone. Where is the Warrior?

Friend, if that’s an honest question, then stare
Into the bathroom glass: there or nowhere.

David Cummings has a published collection of poems, Tancho, which was selected by Alicia Ostriker for the 2013 Richard Snyder Prize and published by The Ashland Poetry Press, Ashland University, Ohio. The poems are meditations on the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The book also won the 2015 Benjamin Franklin Award in Poetry/Literary Criticism from the Independent Book Publishers Association.

Image credit: jamesr12012 via a Creative Commons license.

Deaths of Canaries

By Katherine D. Perry

We were standing together, our fingers loosely grasping
each other’s hands, around the planet.
Here, in the good ole U.S. of A., we had been looking elsewhere
for pain: we didn’t notice when we began
to choke from our own smoldering: arrogance
and first world privilege let us take our Zyrtec and Claritin
for months and months thinking we were overproducing
histamines instead of blaming our own toxic fumes.
We thought we would know better when the moment arrived.

The graffiti at the Krog Street bridge
told us that we needed to call our senators,
told us that we needed to march, to rise up,
told us, with bleeding letters, that the dangers were here and now.
The journals and anthologies filled with poems
about death marches and end of days.
But we went to work anyway, and let the men in Washington
roll over the few-and-far-between women.
We grocery shopped and wrote our outrage on social media
as one by one the artists dropped dead.
We mourned them on SNL and in tributes to the hurricane victims,
but we kept moving.
We forgot to notice the yellow feathers
littering the dying grasses.
We couldn’t be bothered to begin the arduous task:
putting people on elevators, sending them up.

When I looked down at my hand, now empty,
I wondered where my sisters’ fingers had gone.
Even as I dropped to my knees, unable to summon another line
for the next poem, the survival instinct whispered
that help would come.

We were the hope we asked for,
but we were also the fingers pulling the triggers.

Katherine D. Perry is an Associate Professor of English at Perimeter College of Georgia State University. Her first book of poetry, Long Alabama Summer, was released in December of 2017 from Finishing Line Press. Her poems have been published in Women’s Studies Quarterly, Writers Resist, The Dead Mule of Southern Literature, Poetry Quarterly, Melusine, Southern Women’s Review, Bloodroot, Borderlands, Women’s Studies, RiverSedge, Rio Grande Review, and 13th Moon. She is a co-founder of the Georgia State University Prison Education Project which works in Georgia prisons to bring literature and poetry to incarcerated students. She lives in Decatur, Georgia with her spouse and two children. Her website is www.katherinedperry.com.

Image credit: SJDStudio via a Creative Commons license.

The Traitor’s Flag

By Michael Begnal

Fluttering fields of red polyester
hang on aluminum poles

in dystopic yards cleared
from the forest,

posts erected next
to splotchy swing-sets and cracked

plastic pools of mosquito eggs
the South never lost

•

grab the Polaroid, and
quick rub the self-
developing snapshot:

the traitor’s flag
pickled in urine,
new-gen Piss Christ

Michael Begnal is the author of Future Blues (Salmon Poetry, 2012) and Ancestor Worship (Salmon Poetry, 2007), as well as the chapbook The Muddy Banks (Ghost City Press, 2016). His work has appeared in journals and anthologies such as Notre Dame Review, Poetry Ireland Review, Public Pool, Empty Mirror, The Poet’s Quest for God (Eyewear Publishing, 2016), Thinking Continental: Writing the Planet One Place at a Time (University of Nebraska Press, 2017), and he has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He has an MFA from North Carolina State University and teaches at Ball State University. Visit Michael’s website at mikebegnalblogspot.com.

Photo credit: Randy Heinitz via a Creative Commons license.