Poetry – Page 19 – Writers Resist

I Only Smile at Dogs

By Lizz Schumer

Femme is an act of war
Living in this body performance art
Like daring to walk down the street.

(Does my topknot offend you?)

Keeping men’s words out of my head
(Hey baby, smile for me)
To make room for my own.

Lipstick and lace body-armored
My skin is a weapon in your country.
It belonged to all of us until a hostile takeover
Long before any of us was born
Made it unsafe to live without a Y chromosome
In these streets.

What are you so afraid of?

My pheromones give you the wrong idea.
The chemicals I’m wearing in my too-sexy bloodstream
interact with your masculine fragility
And make it ok for you to rape me

Just like that.

I didn’t sign up for the 321,500th regiment
But here we are
An army of one in six
With only our closed legs to protect us.

And you say I’m angry
Like that’s my crime.
Not my thousand-year stare that still doesn’t see equality
Not my pencil legs or grapefruit tits or thigh gap or back fat or asking for it just by virtue of

Being
Here.

I apologize before I act, then after
Because headphones aren’t a barrier you respect

Like my skin
Like my lack of enthusiastic consent
Like my autonomy

Because I don’t exist to you except as a border to be breached
In a conflict my body drafted me into
As a prisoner before we began.

Lizz Schumer is a pansexual, disabled, cisgender white woman (pronouns: she/her) living and working in Astoria, NY. She writes primarily on the themes of living in a body in the world and how our physicality—including the way human brains process surroundings and society—affects experiences. She writes that “I Only Smile at Dogs” grapples with feeling unsafe as a cisgender femme in a patriarchal society. It examines the responsibility placed on female-identifying persons, to “protect” themselves against men, and the expectations society has them because of the bodies they inhabit. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The New York Times, Salon.com, Self.com, Greatist.com, Wordgathering, Breath & Shadow, Minerva Rising, Manifest-Station, and others. She can be found online at www.lizzschumer.com, facebook.com/authorlizzschumer, and on twitter @eschumer.

Photo credit: Gigi Ibrahim via a Creative Commons license.

Tethered by Borders

By Sneha Subramanian Kanta

The space aboriginals find home is soon lost
thereafter; it never belonged to them. Their woe,
the dream of governments, the nightmare of politicians.

Press conferences quibble in placards of justice handed –
smudged in red ink over a white cardboard surface,
as though a widowed woman in India dare wear sindoor.

There are things one is denied by virtue of birth – those
that stick to their entire life, as an uncalled for birthmark.
I have seen militants draw a line of control, patrolling

during the wee hours of night: the owl hoots, insects
sleepily crawl over marshes of white chalk scribbling:
like teaching in silent sermons the value of borderless

spaces. Still, we’re taught to measure prosperity in other
quantum: the import and export in shared extra margins –
while an old woman lying in the corner cries in the cold.

Sneha Subramanian Kanta is a GREAT scholarship awardee and has earned a second postgraduate degree in literature in England. Her poem “At Dusk With the Gods” won the Alfaaz (Kalaage) prize. Her work has been published in Figroot Press, Dirty Paws Poetry Review, Longleaf Review and elsewhere. She is the founding editor of Parentheses Journal, a literary initiative that straddles hybrid genres across coasts and climes. She loves horses and autumn.

Photo credit: Ben Watts via a Creative Commons license.

This poem was first published in Rise Up Review.

Dead in the Water

By Dick Eiden

“German liners struggled heroically to emulate Wagnerian castles, English liners fell into the dark wood and leather habits of a London club.”

– Melvin Maddocks, The Great Liners, (Alexandria, VA, 1978)

The bow went down first, while the stern stood tall, slowly
disappearing two and a half hours after the kissing stopped.
The iceberg ripped a hole, filling five “watertight” compartments.

I’m not conversant with hydraulics, but I’ve seen ships
sink on TV news and countless films. They come to a stop
dead in the water, and with a sense of basic physics I see
how they list — left or right, then sink slowly at first, so slow

It’s hard to see what’s happening.

The size of the ship makes a difference, the nature
and shape of the rupture, where it is in relation to the keel,
bulkheads, engine room. Boats with one compartment can fill
and go down fast. Ocean liners take time as waters bubble up
in cabins, hallways, up stairs to the dance floor on deck four.

It’s too complex to fully understand, but we sense the rupture,
feel the list like an airplane banking into a slow turn. Playing cards
slide on the tray, objects start to roll, but we shuffle and deal,
pour another drink and hope for the best — nothing we can do.

Listen to the ship’s band?
Rearrange the deck chairs?
Make a list of doomed ships?

Dick Eiden is a retired lawyer and lifelong peace and civil rights activist (since 1965). He ran for the U.S. Congress as an independent in 2012. Paying the Rent, a memoir of his adventures as a traveling movement lawyer, will be published in 2018.

“Activism is the rent I pay for living on the planet.” – Alice Walker

Photo credit: Jevgenijs Slihto via a Creative Commons license.

They

By Kate Delany

“They burned their own houses and ran away,” Myanmar police forces said of the Rohingya minorities fleeing burning villages, leaving behind all possessions and their dead.

They burn their own villages.
They won’t learn proper English.
They choose the Mommy track.
They choose to live like that.
They lie. They steal. They rape.
They weep and rage, hormonal,
their finger on the button. They
destroy the projects we build
them. They show up late.
They drop out. They sell drugs.
They come illegally. Look
what they wore. Look how
they acted. Look how what
where they worship. They just want
pity.attention. a pass. Believe me,
they aren’t like us.

Kate Delany is the author of two books of poetry, Reading Darwin (Poets Corner Press) and Ditching (Aldrich Press). Her fiction and verse have appeared in magazines and journals, such as Art Times, Barrelhouse, Jabberwock Review, Room, and Poetry Quarterly. She holds an MA in English from Rutgers-Camden and a BA in English and in Art History from Chestnut Hill College. She lives in Collingswood, New Jersey, with her husband and two children. She blogs about parenting, herbs, gardening, and sustainability at https://tigerseyebotanicalsblog.wordpress.com.

Bad News

By Ellen Girardeau Kempler

In one stop-
action second
you
spin
in
slow
motion
over the sharp edge
of knowing.

There was then
& there is now.

No scrabbling back
up the cliff face.

No rewind button.

No cartoon-stopping
on the way down.

No spaceship
to beam you away.

No, the pressure
is in the here
& now.

Like the whole ocean
bearing down.

Like chloroform-cotton.

Like a pin
piercing you,
straight through
the thorax.

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” @placepoet on Instagram. Follow her on Twitter @goodnewsmuse or visit her website at gold-boat.com.

Photo credit: By Sam Shere (1905–1982) – Zeppelin-ramp de Hindenburg / Hindenburg zeppelin disaster, Public Domain.

The Sestina of Forbidden Words

By Mark J. Mitchell

For Ruth Hulbert

In the dream you’re vulnerable—
small, twisted on yourself—a fetus
waiting for limbs to awake to their diversity,
still unsure of your transgender.
As yet, you have no sense of entitlement,
just a fear, unnamed, somehow science based.

It’s cold where you dream. Evidence is based
on fake mathematics—vulnerable
to logic, but it isn’t entitled
to the attention you give a fetus
(and you’re small—an embryo, ungendered
And stranded in a diverse city).

Your unshaped hands explore the diversity
of cold walls and flowers. Your science is based
only on touch. Not blindness but a trance. Gender
calls your name, telling you how vulnerable
you are—naked, unprotected as a fetus
in the cold, with no sense of entitlement.

Still, you remember books. You know what titles meant
and the cold splendor of word’s diversity.
You would explore the city but a fetus
has no mobility—no evidence to base
direction. Everything is vulnerable
to mistakes—empty eyes, small hands—gender

perhaps. Of course, you’re asleep. You’re transgendered,
fluid as snow about to melt. Your entitlement
runs downhill like water. It’s vulnerable
as a newborn—raw cells, fresh from the diversity
of division. You try to stand on a science base
but there is no footing for a frozen fetus.

Still, it’s your dream and your brave fetus
isn’t awake slipping between transgenders
to search a city for evidence to base
your journey. Your only defense—entitlement
to life and death and this cruel diversity
leaves you puzzled. Frightened. Vulnerable

You’re a poor fetus in a cold world, entitled
to be untransgendered, trapped in fake diversity.
You must stay faith-based—forever vulnerable.

Mark J. Mitchell’s latest novel, The Magic War, was published in 2017 by Loose Leaves Publishing. Having studied writing at UC Santa Cruz under Raymond Carver and George Hitchcock, Mark’s work has appeared in the several anthologies and hundreds of periodicals. He has also published three his chapbooks and a novel: Three Visitors, Lent, 1999, and Artifacts and Relics, and Knight Prisoner. He lives with his wife, the activist Joan Juster, and makes a living pointing out pretty things in San Francisco. He has been active in politics all his life.

Photo credit: Joe Flood via a Creative Commons license.

Two poems by Ginny Lowe Connors

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Onslaught

It spins like a gyroscope,
Our planet. My head.
Wobbles like a promise
too difficult to keep
as the news comes crashing
this way—space stones
hurling toward us from beyond
or from that hidden place
we carry within—
a secret darkness,
unknowable, unthinkable.
O disaster with a tail of flame
you’re hurtling this way again
you’re cratering my brain
and all the pretty cities we have built.

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Forget about It

Hit the snooze button, my fellow Americans,
hit the slot machines. Turn the page, switch

the channel, toss another steak on the barbeque.
Pay no attention to the plagues, the projectiles,

the flying limbs, or to the children who look
toward us, as if we could explain. Tell them our

electrons are all abuzz, they’re attracted, they’re
repelled by the golden glow beyond the power

plants, dust floating everywhere, fires we can’t
explain, flames that have replaced the eyes

of the last coyotes. No wonder we’re running
in circles, no wonder we’re all falling down.

Tell them the towers emit messages of evil
straight into our brains, bzzzt, zap, it makes

us a little crazy, ha ha, our heads floating off
like balloons. Our cell phones spy on us

as we sleep. We’ll turn away, we’ll wander
through the mall, what could be more

American, Big Mac ourselves to smithereens,
to oblivion. Our duty: to be oblivious, to be one

nation, under god, our father up in heaven—but he’s not
coming back, our family’s splintered, rearranged,

commandeered, forever changed, and we’re blind,
and we’re deaf but still yakking, yakking

all the time on the streets, in the vehicles we use
to slaughter our own beautiful hopped-up, zoned-out

young and we keep yakking in the ten million
aisles of merchandise because our family values

the plastic water, artificial turf, Barbie’s sharp
stiletto heels, size of fingernails, size of the astrodome,

home, sweet home, and no, you don’t need,
you’re American, you don’t need to explain

reality, it’s something we watch on TV. If
the desert’s erupting with blood, we’ll pump it with a derrick,

we’ll swill it like cheap wine. We’re chugging
Mai Lai cocktails, chowing down on hot wings straight

from Hiroshima, hot as hell, we’re spitting out the bones,
and if your appetite’s the kind that gnaws at you, gnaws

at you, gnaws, there’s Charlottesville stew a-simmering,
we’ve saved some just for you— we’re stuffing

ourselves silly, we’re tweeting, we’re plugging into iTunes,
it’s all the rage. All the rage. Children strut the streets

in tee-shirts sporting photos of their dead, shot,
stabbed, another one today, did you know him?

I heard his sister moan No, not him, while his best
boy insisted he was turnin’ his life around. His blood,

it soaked the ground as this old wound, our so-called
world, kept turning itself, turning itself around.

Don’t wait for the facts, let it all just spin itself out.
Let the ground turn itself over, let the trees splinter.

Let the hurricanes howl, let glaciers creep over us again
with their slow, cold, pale indifferent melt.

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Ginny Lowe Connors is the author of several poetry collections, including Toward the Hanging Tree: Poems of Salem Village. Connors has also edited a number of poetry anthologies, including the recently published Forgotten Women: A Tribute in Poetry. She is the editor of Connecticut River Review. Connors runs a small poetry press, Grayson Books. Visit her website at ginnyloweconnors.com.

Image credit: Trauma and Dissociation via a Creative Commons license.

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What ‘War for the Planet of the Apes’ Reveals about Humans

By Martin Ott

Yes, we can be convinced to cheer
for our own extinction.
My coworker debates which side
to root for but settles on apes.
Humans act like monsters or have
always yanked borderlines into garrotes.
The creatures learn to communicate and are
almost undone by curses, signs, and guns.
Least among us is a mantra from the rich
and mercy is a weapon of the rich.
Space is an egg and potentially a prison
or hope depending on what came first or last,
the sameness of war no matter the cause.

Martin Ott has published eight books of poetry and fiction, most recently Lessons in Camouflage, C&R Press, 2018. His first two poetry collections won the De Novo and Sandeen Prizes. His work has appeared in more than two hundred magazines and fifteen anthologies. This poem is from his manuscript Fake News Poems, 2017 Year in Review, 52 Weeks, 52 Headlines, 52 Poems. More at www.martinottwriter.com. Follow him on Twitter @ottopops and at his blog, writeliving.wordpress.com.

Image credit: Internet folly.

Active 3D printer situation

By Tara Campbell

Before you download
the plans for your AR-15
please also download
the plans for our son

In case of loss
please reprint the following:
one son
who loves his dog
and his friends at school
and his little sister
and even his parents
you know
he’s still young enough
to say “I love you”
and give us a kiss
without blushing
do you have the right
printer for that?

Please inform us
which resin you’re using
because we need to know
you’ll be able to reprint his laugh
and reproduce how he held
his baby sister
brow furrowed
shoulders hunched
like he was balancing an egg
on top of a balloon

Do you know the right setting
for how he always sat down
when he held her
because he was so afraid
of hurting a delicate thing

If you have all of that
then go ahead
but please also download
just one more thing:
this blueprint of an intact family
so you can recreate our life
before
just in case

Tara Campbell (www.taracampbell.com) is a fiction editor at Barrelhouse and an MFA candidate at American University. Prior publication credits include SmokeLong Quarterly, Masters Review, b(OINK), Booth, Spelk, Jellyfish Review, Strange Horizons, and Queen Mob’s Teahouse. Her debut novel, TreeVolution, was published in 2016, and her collection, Circe’s Bicycle, was released spring 2018.

Photo credit: Electric-Eye via a Creative Commons license.

From the Field

By Anthony Ceballos

With the barrel of a gun, you have drawn
a line in the soil and told us to stay on our side,

we are merely creatures of the dirt to you;
from us you have taken food and shelter,

water and dignity, our children swallow thorns
and pride is hanging from a broken tooth.

Our seeds desire earth’s careful nourishment,
yet you keep us hollow and deprived, stripped

of that which makes us human, makes us holy,
we are less than worthy beings in your eyes,

we are composed of rust, of bombs and
needles, broken glass and landmines.

You toss hand grenades and beer cans
on our side of the field and cry “filth” when

we don’t clean, when we do you toss
more our way and expect us to pick off

any meat left after you feast, scraps of
dignity you leave behind in corroding piles;

but dirt is never static, it can be moved,
and lines drawn by the barrel of a gun

can be blown away by a simple breath
from an unexpected direction, so I, so we,

these so-called creatures of the dirt, will fill
our lungs with neon, we will fill our lungs

with the breath of a revolution and exhale.

In 2015, Anthony Ceballos received his BFA from the Creative Writing programs at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota. He has been a guest on KFAI’s Write on Radio and Fresh Fruit radio programs and has read for Intermedia Arts Queer Voices Reading Series, Minneapolis Community and Technical College’s Night of Native American Music and Poetry, The Many Faces of Two-Spirit People gallery show at Two Rivers Art Gallery, and the Five Writers, Five Minutes, Five Watt reading series at the Five Watt coffee shop, all located in good ol’ Minnesota. In 2014, he won the George Henry Bridgeman Poetry Award from Hamline University. In 2016, he was selected to be a Loft Literary Center 2016/2017 Mentor Series mentee. His work has been featured in the Indigenous lit journal Yellow Medicine Review. He lives and breathes in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and is currently working on a first poetry collection. “From the Field” was previously published by Homo Hotdish.

Photo credit: Elaine S. via a Creative Commons license.

This Union

By Samara Golabuk

In the hegemony of discontinuity,
we have laughter on the stairs
that flies up like a murder of crows
into brushed metal skies tasting nothing like
the pure rule of dog law.

In the circling year,
spiders crawl through our eyes
while our hearts sing ruddy bloody chanties
ripe with crocus and tequila rose,
a modest harmony worlds apart
from the subtraction of us from this place.

Clock in, clock out, clock in, clock out
is the circus slaughter of eagles—
a functional theory of regimes
that marches on us in the deadly faith of toy wars—
and in our ears, celebrity;
mandatory oil import quotas;
and tax deferred investment opportunities.
The old man upstairs listens close to wavelengths
like in the old days, says,
“We almost lost Detroit.
Sure’n yeah, that was close.”

In the hegemony of discontinuity,
that fucktional theory of regimes,
all our clouds are artificial, and
the birds—sacrificial, ornamental.

Samara is a Pushcart nominee whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in Eyedrum Periodically, Anti-Heroin Chic, Eunoia Review, Plum Tree Tavern and others. She has two children, works in marketing and design, and has returned to university to complete her BA in Poetry. More at www.samarawords.com.

Photo credit: Paul Sullivan via a Creative Commons license.

Nike Adjusting Her Sandal, Again

By Anastasia Vassos

She stops, breathless, she lifts her heel behind her to straighten her stocking before she pulls at her jacket to make sure there are no wrinkles, before she runs into H.R. breathless to tell Susan, who’s sitting at her desk, that Bob continues to make lewd comments and won’t let it go, no matter that she’s told him three times to stop it or she’ll go to H.R., but still, he persists and so she runs to tell Susan, who she hopes will do something, but if she doesn’t, it’ll be all over the news before the sun goes down, and it will feel as close as anything to victory.

(after Nike Adjusting Her Sandal, Temple of Athena Nike, Acropolis)

Anastasia Vassos is a poet living and writing in Boston, Massachusetts. Her poems have appeared most recently in Gravel Mag, Haibun Today, The Literary Bohemian, and Right Hand Pointing. Her poem Tinos, August 2012, was published by MassPoetry.org, as Poem of the Moment in March 2017. She recently participated as a contributor at the Breadloaf Writers Conference in Middlebury, Vermont. She is a long-distance cyclist.

From the editors: We have a favor to ask. If you like what you’re reading, if you support what Writers Resist is doing, you can help us continue publishing. Give a sawbuck here.

A Year Later

By Brit Barnhouse

What you’re eating isn’t healthy. Do you see it? You
always said the Holy Trifecta of impolite conversation
was money, religion, and politics, and I ate it up until
I starved on lack of substance. Do you see that you’re
withering too? I’m not asking for atonement, as if
mistakes could be scrubbed out with tumbleweeds of
steel, though you could use a good seasoning to get all
that rust off. I want you to see things the way they are:
Torn as vocal chords and sweet from fermented
buyer’s remorse bottled up and bursting. You should
know by now dollar bills steeped in hot water don’t
sooth the throat, despite all your sucking and tugging.
I could salvage the yeast from this batch, sell it as a
novel extraction to be lapped up while supplies last,
but this is more than a vat problem, a one-off fluke to
be ignored. This is more than incorrect packaging,
though God knows we can be easily fooled by the
right font in under 140 characters. This is a source
problem I won’t wait for you to catch up with. I will
keep turning fields where failure is a fistful of nitrogen
swept under the rug. I will plant new crops of opened
eyes, soaked and salted, and one day I will become
drunk off your bitterness.

Brit spends quite a bit of time contemplating how writing can be used to communicate complex ideas in accessible language and how storytelling grips us into action when it is most needed. Most of her own writing stems from lessons found in nature but when she isn’t writing about the ever-blurred lines between animals and humans, Brit can be found hoping for close encounters with whales in the Puget Sound, giving her dogs belly rubs, or tossing treats out to the neighborhood crows. Read more of her work at britbarnhouse.wordpress.com.

From the editors: We have a favor to ask. If you like what you’re reading, if you support what Writers Resist is doing, you can help us continue publishing. Give a sawbuck here.

America Is Waiting

By Georg Koszulinski

maybe it’s the white bodies
leaving the ball

or maybe it’s the tuxedos
and gowns that walk like
ghosts across the mall

maybe it’s the black bodies
chained across checkpoints
subverting iconographies
of hate

or maybe it’s the cops
who stand in silent symmetries
beneath the rain

maybe it’s the sadness
in their eyes—
the dreams they sense
were always lies

maybe it’s the protestors
who take to street in
dark of light

the man with movie camera
who walks among them—
shadows, voices, line of sight

maybe it’s the war veteran
deaf in left ear—
metaphors find their way
into lived experience

maybe it’s the young woman
who lost her friend to
mass arrest

she tries to breathe, believe,
reprieve

maybe it’s the parade of state
cavalry, missiles, golden
power shower

maybe it’s the communion of souls
in the crossroads of the streets

the man singing in Mandarin
before the camera—
not knowing the words
we believe he sings
for peace

maybe the voice was the first weapon—
no shield against the
sounds of aggression

maybe the voice
was first song—
to breathe, to sound
commune as one

January 20, 2017, Washington, DC

Georg has been making films and videos since 1999. His award-winning works have been presented at hundreds of universities and film festivals around the world, most recently at the Atlanta Film Festival, San Francisco DocFest, and Experiments in Cinema. Many of his documentaries and experimental essay films are also available through Fandor. His nonfiction and poetry have been published in Gold Man Review, Blue Collar Review and Blotterature Literary Magazine. His current documentary project, White Ravens: A Legacy of Resistance focuses on the Haida Nation and the cultural resurgence taking place on their islands of Haida Gwaii. Georg is an Assistant Professor of Film Studies at the University of North Carolina Wilmington where he teaches filmmaking.

Image credit: A still from Georg’s documentary America Is Waiting. View the trailer here.

From the editors: We have a favor to ask. If you like what you’re reading, if you support what Writers Resist is doing, you can help us continue publishing. Give a sawbuck here.

An Explanation

By Faith Breisblatt

As far as I’m concerned, there was only
one choice. If I turned down every

candidate who objectified women, I’d vote
for no one. You get through the bad and focus

on the good.
Did I feel dirty? Yes.

Look at how much he relies on his daughter—
kind of reminds me of my ex-husband.

The man knows how to build things.

If you don’t like something,
there is a label to shame you.

This is a Christian country
paying for some else’s abortion.

Now I’m deplorable?
Poor Bill Cosby.

It wasn’t all racist white people. When my great grandparents came,
they had to learn English.

My family moved from Canada because of the horrors
of socialism. Look,

I’m not saying there are people who shouldn’t
be helped. I’m no racist.

I’m looking for a brighter future.
I laughed him off just like everyone else.

A found poem, written from articles in the New York Times, “‘You Focus on the Good’: Women Who Voted for Trump, in Their Own Words” and The Concourse, “Trump Voters Explain Themselves.”

Faith Breisblatt is a social worker living in Boston. Her writing can be found in The New Social Worker, Oddball Magazine, Found Poetry Review, Scripting Change, Toe Good Poetry, Boston Poetry Magazine, and elsewhere.

Photo credit: Original, unaltered image originally published by the New York Times.

Insomnia

By Amy Shaw

Maybe it’s because
These hours are quiet
Without bread or shoe
Dropping on dirty floor

Maybe it’s because
I am alone needed
No more Maybe

It’s the darkness
Which somehow feels
More vivid and light
Than the dreams I had

Maybe it’s the wine
I drank with dinner
Maybe it’s my fault

The dishes undone the bed
Unmade the face unkept
The homework unchecked
The picture unframed

No one would call me
A clean freak—though I was

Voted “Most Likely To Succeed”
In the seventh grade Maybe
It’s because I did
Succeed The bills are paid

The children fed the husband
Satiated a job well done today
My patient said I cared
More than the doctor

And me just a PA—always
Just a—

Stepmom white divorced woman blessed
The waitress asked
“Are you just one?”
Before I sat down to dinner

On my own I thought—
Not really
Sometimes but usually
Only at night—

Amy Shaw is a cardiology PA living and working in Cheyenne, Wyoming. She turned to poetry after the recent election to focus on the personal in what feels like a world coming apart at the seams. Her poems have been published on PoetsReadingtheNews.com.

Photo credit: Jim Pennucci via a Creative Commons license.

What I Want

By Judith Prest

I want the open sore
our country has become
to finish draining
and start healing

I want the kneeling
football players
awarded trophies
for honoring the fallen

I want the ancestors
to gather, sing us songs
of solidarity
stroke our brows while we sleep

I want to see the homeless rise
from subway grates, park benches
I want their empty bowls filled
with opportunity and blessing

just once,
I want to see billionaires
breaking bread with single moms,
parolees, runaways, bag ladies

I want the grandmothers, the mothers
to have enough time, enough money,
enough food to feed
and nurture all who come to the table

I want to see reconciliation
trump racism and genocide
to see compassion become our currency,
law to become infused with love

Judith Prest is a poet, creativity coach, mixed media artist, photographer and workshop leader. She has taught creative writing, expressive arts and creativity and healing workshops in prisons, community centers, retirement communities, libraries, schools, retreat centers, and at her home based Spirit Wind Studio. A retired school social worker, she works part time leading Recovery Writing and Expressive Arts groups for adults in day treatment for addiction. She believes that creativity is our birthright as humans and that accessing and using our creativity is a wonderful strategy for healing ourselves and the planet. Her poetry has been published in seven anthologies and in literary journals, and she has self published three collections of poetry over the past twenty years. She lives in rural upstate NY with her husband and three cats.

Photo credit: Gaspar Torres via a Creative Commons license.

On the Knees of Metal Gods

By G. Louis Heath

Someday soon, better later, the icons we
Worship will leap from their cathedrals

To quick pulses, the implosive blood of
Impulse. On that surge, the hooded eyes

Of eternity will blink, or they will not.
The existential surge of non-being rises

On the tide of fathomless hearts till the
Fates take their measure. Some fates cut

Threads, some do not. That is the simple
Algorithm of a globe balanced on knees

Of pricey metal gods. Let us lock arms and
Bury these false gods far from their silos.

G. Louis Heath, Ph.D., Berkeley, 1969, is Emeritus Professor, Ashford University, Clinton, Iowa. He enjoys reading his poems at open mics. He often hikes along the Mississippi River, stopping to work on a poem he pulls from his back pocket, weather permitting. He has published poems in a wide array of journals. His books include Leaves Of Maple and Long Dark River Casino.

Photo credit: Mark Miller via a Creative Commons license.

Female Fellow at the American Film Institute Doheny Mansion, Beverly Hills, 1971

By Penny Perry

She pulled up in her dented VW, twenty
miles from her cockroach-filled kitchen.
Five feet tall, wearing a three-dollar dress
from Lerner’s. The dress long and black,
looked expensive. N.O.W. had picketed
the all male institute the year before.
Marble floors. Carved wood staircases.
Louis the 14th chairs. The study where
one Doheny murdered another.
The dining room with the gold chandelier
that tinkled and rose when Hitchcock
or Truffaut screened their latest film.

Most of the male fellows looked well-fed
and had smooth white hands. Over wine
and brie in the Great Hall that first night
the men surveyed the female fellows.
Will announced she had nice-sized breasts
for such a small girl. Gilbert whispered
the women here were dogs, present
company excepted. A compliment from Ivan:
Her dialog was sharp. She wrote like a man.
Sam said because she was a writer she wasn’t
a real woman. At dinner, she and a directing
fellow, Susan, sat across the table from

Gregory Peck. Head twirling: The Louis
14th chairs. The chandelier. Dizzy with
wine, she and Susan fantasized bowling
Sam’s head down a long marble hall. Work
days, bent over her dime-store notebook,
her pen unzipped the page. She wrote under
a gnarled sycamore. Her boys, two and three,
splashed in a stone fountain. One day, chicken
pox, red as poppies, bloomed on her sons.
Male fellows came down with the pox.
Sam had sores on his thumb and on his tongue,
a wound that would scab, but not heal.

Penny Perry is a six-time Pushcart Prize nominee in poetry and fiction. Her work has appeared in California Quarterly, Lilith, Redbook, Earth’s Daughter, the Paterson Literary Review and the San Diego Poetry Annual. Her first collection of poems, Santa Monica Disposal & Salvage (Garden Oak Press, 2012) earned praise from Marge Piercy, Steve Kowit, Diane Wakoski and Maria Mazziotti Gillan. She writes under two names, Penny Perry and Kate Harding.

Photo credit: Doheny Mansion living room courtesy of University of California.

Bathsheba wants to write #metoo

By Crystal Stone

Her husband enlisted: eager to fight,
eager to serve. She was a good wife,
accepted this. She could argue, but why
fight? The last night the sun set pale
in their wine by the garden. The last
kiss was fragile—lips thin and chapped
with goodbyes. In his absence, she bathed
behind a wickerwork screen, enjoyed
the iridescent rainbows of shampoo bubbles,
the way soft light manicured her nails,
the curl of toes beneath hot water,
the volume of hair as humidity twirled
fingers around her loose locks. The king
would watch from the roof, share this private
moment with her. If the rainbow is god’s
promise to never flood the earth again,
why not her eyes, too? Or her body?
When a king calls, what can a servant do
but wait, for the coming to hang her
stomach in effigy of the life she once had
and the child to rip her sharply, as if only
worn fabric of her newly retired silk gown?

Crystal Stone is a first-year MFA candidate at Iowa State University. Her work has previously appeared in The Badlands Review, Green Blotter, North Central Review, Jet Fuel Review, Southword Journal Online and Dylan Days. When she’s not writing poems, you can find her on her roller skates blocking for Team United Roller Derby.

Photo credit: Image of Jean-Leon Gerome’s Bathsheba from Wikiart via a Creative Commons license.