Poetry – Page 2 – Writers Resist

Endless War

By Linda Bamber

Cassandra swore there was no Gulf of Tonkin
but of course
no one believed her.
She knew the Trojan Horse was loaded with death
and that there were no WMD’s in Iraq

and if Paris, her brother, stole Helen
Troy would fall
and all its people be enslaved.
Then the Pentagon Papers came out.
Didn’t I . . . ? said Cassandra when people were shocked.

Now infanticide
hostage-taking
retaliation beyond imagination.
Genocide. Starvation.

Cassandra tears her hair.
Since Balfour’s birth
(frantic, disbelieved)

she’s tried to tell us this
is what would be
from the river to the sea.

Poet’s Note
In classical texts, Cassandra was admired by the god Apollo, who gave her the gift of prophecy. In a different mood, he added the curse that no one would believe her.
The Balfour Declaration of 1917 is generally referenced as the moment when Britain decided it would suit its geo-political interests to establish a Jewish Protectorate in the Middle East.

Linda Bamber is a poet and a Professor of English at Tufts University. Both her poetry collection, Metropolitan Tang, and her fiction collection, Taking What I Like, were published by David R. Godine, Publisher. Widely excerpted and anthologized, her critical book on Shakespeare, Comic Women, Tragic Men: Gender and Genre in Shakespeare, was published by Stanford University Press. Bamber has published in periodicals such as The Harvard Review, The Nation, Ploughshares, The New York Times Book Review, The Kenyon Review, The Florida Review, and The Missouri Review. She is currently writing a novella based on the cross-country expedition of Lewis and Clark.

Photo credit: “Trojan Horse” by Terra Incognita! via a Creative Commons license.

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The Coming

By Craig Kirchner

His wife rushed in looking like she couldn’t breathe.
They’re coming, the man at the gate told me.
They call ahead so he is not an issue. We have an hour.

He printed out all the poems and put them in a box,
buried them in the woods behind the condo,
gave his wife the key and a scribbled map.

When they come, they’ll take the laptop,
so I deleted and scrubbed the best I could.
Don’t lock the door, they’ll just beat it down.

Tell the grandchildren I was just trying to be me.
It wasn’t meant to be disrespectful or unpatriotic,
and that I love them.

If I return and things ever get back to normal,
we’ll dig them up and be careful who we share them with.
I’ll burn the ones about the camps and the purge.

If I don’t come back, and no one has yet,
you know I have loved you, as much as it is possible to love,
and never meant to ruin your life with my words.

Craig loves storytelling and the aesthetics of the paper and pen. He has had two poems nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and has a published book of poetry, Roomful of Navels. After a hiatus, he was recently published in Decadent Review, Yellow Mama, Chiron Review, The Main Street Rag, and several dozen other journals.

Photo credit: Ralf Steinberger via a Creative Commons license.

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Poem in Response to Mass Shooting Number 130 in the United States of America 2023

By Ellen Girardeau Kempler

This poem is a scaffolding
built of assault weapons
& high-capacity magazines
for recurring questions I have,
a terrible structure for hanging
reloadable horrors in bright daylight.

What questions?
you might ask. I’m dumbfounded.
I can’t even

answer, can only instruct you
to remain perfectly quiet & listen—
maybe hide behind/under a desk,
evaluate your escape routes,
hug your friends, text your family,
dial 911, take out your ear buds,
stop talking, notice the sound
of your heart throbbing in time
with the blood still mercifully
coursing through your body.

My questions arise again & again
in sudden gasps, forever-startled
intakes of breath, metallic taste of
bile in my mouth, unanswerable,
mute.

Ellen Girardeau Kempler’s poems have appeared in the Dewdrop, Wild Roof Journal, Tiny Seed Literary Journal, Narrative Northeast and many other small presses and anthologies. In 2016, she won Ireland’s Blackwater International Poetry Prize and honorable mention in Winning Writers’ Tom Howard/Margaret Reid Poetry Contest. Called “a timely and powerful selection of climate poetics,” her chapbook, Thirty Views of a Changing World: Haiku + Photos, was published in December 2017 by Finishing Line Press. Her next chapbook, Fire in my Head, Flame in My Heart: Poems of the Pyrocene, is forthcoming from Kelsay Books in 2025.

Photo credit: Stephen Melkisethian via a Creative Commons license.

When I hear ‘migration,’ I think of ships

By Christian Hanz Lozada

chopping through tides and promise.
My coworker says, “I mean, I’m white,
so, implicit bias much? We have no story,”
referring to her kid’s project asking
about how the family’s migration
was affected by World War 2 and the Cold War.

She says, “I understand I can’t say anything,
but we’ve been American since the 18^th century,
so there’s been no migration.”
In my head I have solutions: Has your family moved
from state to state, like the Japanese Americans pulled
from their homes or the African Americans moving

to fill a Japanese American-sized void to work factories
and shipyards? Has your family migrated from economy
to economy, like the migration from planting and picking
to packing and making? Has your family never had to run,
never had that nothing-holding-us-here, never had that

nothing-to-stake-a-future-on, always the absence
of the absence? Maybe write about your migration,
after the ship, when you carried the sword and the gun,
the whip and the blankets. Maybe write about the bow-wave
your presence creates, even when the ship doesn’t move.
Maybe write about the unintended migrations that happen
as your presence displaces everything around it.

Christian Hanz Lozada aspires to be like a cat, a creature that doesn’t care about the subtleties of others and who will, given time and circumstance, eat their owner. He authored the poetry collection He’s a Color, Until He’s Not and co-authored Leave with More Than You Came With. His Pushcart Prize nominated poetry has appeared in journals from California to Australia with stops in Hawaii, Korea, and the United Kingdom. Christian has featured at the Autry Museum and Beyond Baroque. He lives in San Pedro, CA and uses his MFA to teach his neighbors and their kids at Los Angeles Harbor College.

Photo credit: Dennis Jarvis via a Creative Commons license.

The Dream Children of Addison Mitchell McConnell III

By Michael Henson

What are the dreams
That await the sleep of Mitch McConnell?
Do children enter with their hungers?
Do they sit at the side of the road of dream
with their empty bowls
and their wide curious eyes?
I believe they wait each day in their hidden places
along the congressional corridors,
hidden in the pedestals of the heroic torsos
or in the pages of the latest allocation.
They listen closely
as he takes counsel
with donors, with lobbyists,
and with the men who line their pockets
with congressional silver.
And when at last he reaches the end of his workday,
and his heels click along the marble floors,
the dream children follow him home
to the commodious house where he takes his rest.
They watch and they wait until,
after all the calls to more donors, more lobbyists,
he lays his wearied head, at last,
onto his expensive pillow.
There, they gather each night.
I fear they might stumble
into his commodious jowls
and be smothered under his multiple chins.
But they are adept.
They enter, like miners,
through the drift mouth of his ears
or down the haunted portals of his nostrils.
And there they begin to explore.
Their tiny encandled skulls
flicker in the catacombic corridors
and all along the calcified neurons of his cerebellum.
They tiptoe carefully to avoid
the pockets of methane and legislative obstruction
as they explore each lobe, from stem to cerebellum:
Frontal, temporal, parietal, and occipital,
through the fraught closets of the hypothalamus,
careful not to stumble
into the stagnant, trauma-riddled pools of his amygdala,
wherein lie the fraught tangles of its medial, basolateral
and fearfully anterior subnuclei
and into the committee rooms of the medulla oblongata.
There they observe the nodes of prevarication and avarice,
the glands of duplicity, the ganglia of manipulation
and those synapses
in which are sparked the neural signals
for insult and vituperation.
They continue in their nightlong forensic investigations,
to search, hopelessly,
amid the odor of carbide and conspiracy,
for any hint,
any flickering shard
of the dismal wreckage of a soul.

Michael Henson is author of six books of fiction and four collections of poetry. His most recent is the satirical novella, The Triumphal Descent of Donald J. Trump into Hell by Donald J. Trump as recounted to The Archangel Gabriel, from a Manuscript Discovered, Edited, and Translated from the Original Aramaic into Modern English by Michael Henson. He is a member of the Southern Appalachian Writers Cooperative and sings lead for the Carter Bridge, a Cincinnati-based bluegrass band.

Photo credit: Douglas Graham via the U.S. Library of Congress.

Welcome to Writers Resist the Summer 2024 Issue

It’s summer and all kinds of things are in bloom—beautiful and ugly—but we’re happy you’re here.

We’re moved by the courage of those who give voice to their righteous struggles.

We’re determined to continue to be able to challenge the inequitable and untenable.

We’re hopeful climate leaders will be followed.

We’re particularly grateful to Dorothy and Rebecca for their extraordinary, generous support—thank you!

And, we’re delighted to give thanks to this issue’s contributing authors and artists:

Kayla Blau, “God in Hiding“

Anna Lucia Deloia, “In Florida“

Dameien Nathaniel, “Trans Joy: A Selfie in Five Parts“

Ell Cee, “Make a Splash“

Laura Grace Weldon, “Miss Suzie Had a Baby, She Named Him Tiny Tim“

Zhihua Wang, “2020“

Myna Change, “Suburban Survival“

Elizabeth Birch, “Come Mourn with Me“

Eduardo Ramos, “Shukran“

Micaela Kaibni Raen, “Death Equals Silence“

Michal Rubin, “Numbers“

Shieva Salehnia, “Baptism“

Dick Westheimer, “Inside the Serotonin Industrial Complex“

If you’d like to join them for our virtual Writers Resist Reads, on Saturday 27 July at 5:00 p.m. PACIFIC, please request the Zoom link via WritersResist@gmail.com.

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Photo credit: K-B Gressitt

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God in Hiding

By Kayla Blau

Our five-year-old fingers plucked mancala beads,
wove white flower crowns,
blew dandelion seed wishes.
Our Barbies knew no god.
Our families spoke nothing of politics.
Sleepovers at hers were cardamom and allspice,
steaming lamb nestled under mounds of rice, fried eggplant, labneh and cucumber.
Sleepovers at mine, sustained by cardboard box macaroni and cheese,
spoons slick with I Can’t Believe it’s Not Butter.
In middle school, her AIM screen name read jordanianprincess91.
Later, she told me her parents fibbed, spun stories of Jordanian roots
rather than risk the reclamation of “Palestinian” in our majority-white suburb.
My ancestors hid the same, cut the “stein” from our last name,
the trade-offs the hunted make for survival, for safety.
Later still, ICE agents forced Leila’s parents’ hand,
plucked her family from U.S suburbia back to East Jerusalem.
When I visited her,
Holy Land revealed
metal cages, Jews-only streets,
protestors spouting “Death to Arabs” in the same language my ancestors prayed in.
What of apartheid is holy?
What god reigns here?

Kayla Blau (she/her) is a queer writer and facilitator based in Seattle, WA. Her work can be found in The Seventh Wave, The Stranger, Crosscut, and South Seattle Emerald, among others. Her poetry and personal essays are included in anthologies such as Emerald Reflections, Writing for Peace: Resistance Issue, and Wanderlust. More of her work can be found at www.keepgoing.press.

Photo credit: Kashfi Halford via a Creative Commons license.

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Thank you for reading! If you appreciate creative resistance and would like to support it, you can make a small, medium or large donation to Writers Resist from our Give a Sawbuck page.

In Florida

By Anna Lucia Deloia

a school principal confiscates
the dictionary. When a student tries to look up
the meaning of ontology (n.), she is informed
that she doesn’t exist. In Massachusetts,
the police storm a classroom to apprehend
a graphic novel. They bury it in it the woods
behind the station, because ideas aren’t allowed
in prison either – but that’s a different poem.
Every time a book is banned, a child falls
down an elevator shaft in their dream
of a future universe. Every time
a book is banned, we blow up a word
that could have meant conceivable,
if not attainable. In the United States,
we define sexual content (n.) as whatever is generative,
whatever makes us squirm, makes us learn,
makes us all. So, maybe it isn’t a different poem.
Maybe it’s a shovel. Maybe somewhere, there’s a big, hot pit of boiling
knowledge we have criminalized, and maybe a dictionary is being formed
in the core of the earth, the entry for disposable (adj.) reading
nothing, nothing, nothing,
no one, ever again.

Anna Lucia Deloia (she/her) is a queer, Italian-American social science researcher, educator, and writer based in Massachusetts. Her poetry is published or forthcoming in Rattle, Midway Journal, and Paterson Literary Review. Learn more at annaluciakirby.com.

Photo credit: Timothy Neesam via a Creative Commons license.

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Trans Joy: A Selfie in Five Parts

By Dameien Nathaniel

1.
2007 and I have gotten my first flip phone.
We are hanging out after the after school
art club, and Alyssa has just informed me
that this cell phone can take photos.
You just have to open it, access the camera,
hold the phone at arm’s length, and do your best,
since you can’t see yourself on the screen.
My hair is dirty blond, my clothes
are ripped hand-me-downs from my sisters,
and my arms are covered by sleeves that cover
wristbands so no one can see the Band-Aids.

2.
2011 and I’m a little late to the smartphone game.
I bought it just so I could talk to my new crush.
I haven’t yet figured out how to send him photos,
but taking them is the same as before,
it’s just made a little easier with mirrors.
So bathroom selfie, posed and using
the reflection to see if I look good. Just enough
clothing to hide my thighs, arms still needing
to be covered for the same reason, a little bit
of cleavage, and the currently popular duck face.

3.
2013 and my new phone has a forward-facing camera.
My hair is the shortest it has ever been,
but that doesn’t scare boys away, somehow it interests
the girls though. I have just downloaded SnapChat
and I appreciate that no one gets to see
these photos for more than three seconds. Pose
in front of the dorm bathroom mirror, pose at the
dorm welcome desk while working, pose lying
in my dorm bed, every one with a peace sign
blocking my face. My friends ask me for wya photos.
Strangers find me and ask for nudes.

4.
2018 and this phone has hit the ground so many times,
I’m amazed it still works with all the cracks.
One photo in the hotel room, smiling, hiding
that I’m shaking. The second in hospital gown
with an IV in my arm, sent to SnapChat with the caption
see you all in a few hours. The third taken
in my mother’s car on the drive home.
I’m posing in sunglasses, an exaggerated pout,
and using my free hand to pull my shirt down
just enough to show off the surgical binder. I caption this
Well, that’s a huge weight off my chest.

5.
2023 and I don’t know why this phone needs
four cameras, but it was the cheapest option.
I haven’t been blond since 2008, and I haven’t
covered cuts with Band-Aids since 2013. I tried
the selfie-a-day challenge and never stopped,
but most of them stay in my private albums.
A smile at the zoo with friends, a cute outfit
in the mirror before work, a bubble bath with
wine and music, a funny hat on a Tuesday,
a picture of myself standing in front of a cliff–
and a memory where I no longer want to jump.

Poet’s note: An accompaniment to this piece, titled “Unalive Yourself” was published by Mobius: The Journal of Social Change in May of 2024.

Dameien Nathaniel is a queer, trans, autistic poet from the Northeast United States. They are currently pursuing their MFA in poetry from Arcadia University, with their work centering around themes of trauma, loss, mental health, and queer identity. Dameien can be found performing at open mics and slams throughout New England.

Photo courtesy of Dameien Nathaniel.

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Miss Suzie Had a Baby, She Named Him Tiny Tim

By Laura Grace Weldon

Outrage drives me outside,
a choice a woman can still make.
I clamber close to our muddy creek
collecting trash caught in fallen branches.
I empty water from a Stroh’s bottle
and battered jug of Cheer detergent.
Pull out blue plastic bags and
an honest-to-God wire hanger.
Untangle a multicolored jump rope
with red wooden handles,
the kind we jumped with during
recess at Pine Elementary School
chanting K.I.S.S.I.N.G., and Cinderella.
Some girls were such good skippers
they didn’t miss a jump till a whistle’s
shrill made us head back in,
line up at the drinking fountain, then
sit every minute of three more hours.
I hear singsong rhymes in my mind
as I walk back with this trash
still feeling our legs leap,
our hair fly in synch,
drumbeat of feet on the ground
the way girls and women
from the beginning
have worked together
while singing in unison.

Laura Grace Weldon lives in a township too tiny for traffic lights where she works as a book editor, teaches writing workshops, and maxes out her library card. Laura served as Ohio’s 2019 Poet of the Year and is the author of four books. lauragraceweldon.com

Photo credit: ErstwhileHuman via a Creative Commons license.

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2020

By Zhihua Wang

It’s October now,
I am still listening to the song
“Beautiful Springtime.”
It seems the spring
of 2020 never came.

The moon must love
my daughter’s window
more as it often has songs
flying out of it.

I am in love with my bed now.
Every time I lie on my pillow,
wrapped in my comforter,
I think of him.

Poems are flowers
I pick on my road.
I pack them well to send out –
when they open them, I hope
the fragrance is still there.

I used to believe the majority
of the world thinks the same
as me. Now I know it’s only
half. But I should still cheer
even if the win is by a hair.

Zhihua Wang received her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Central Arkansas and is currently a Ph.D. student in Creative Writing at the University of Rhode Island. Her poems have appeared in Aji, Last Leaves, Across the Margin, Eunoia Review, and elsewhere.

Photo credit: Alessandro Giangiulio via a Creative Commons license.

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Come Mourn with Me

By Elizabeth Birch

Come mourn with me. Pour
your aching hearts into the endless
hole we dug to house
Mother Nature’s empty self.
Come throw
your smashed cans, stretched plastic, burnt oil, and dung
on her hollow body below. Come
cry for all the ifs, buts, and whys
we should’ve asked ourselves
decades ago and rejoice
in memories of cooler days. Come
hold my helpless hand and keep
me as close as you wish you kept her. Read
me your regrets but know
no eulogy
will wake her.

Elizabeth Birch lives in Plymouth, Massachusetts. Her poetry has been featured in previous or forthcoming issues of Yellow Arrow Journal, The Tiger Moth Review, and “For the Love of Words” of Easton Community Access Television.

Photo credit. M. Appelman via a Creative Commons license.

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Shukran

By Eduardo Ramos

Thank you for sharing your world
and helping me connect with mine.
For speaking words unfamiliar to my ears
stirring memories in my tongue.
Usted reacquainted me with Al-Andalus
and the road across Africa to Al-Mashriq,
reaffirmed that my barrio is a rich mix of cultures,
where we eat arroz and kipe with our plantains.
Ojalá that others from my island
can find the root you helped me trace,
and that we find more roots,
hasta que we recover
the voices empires sought to silence.

Eduardo Ramos is a Dominican poet from New York. His poetry has appeared in Fahmidan Journal and Lit. 202. Follow him on X at @EduardoRamosii.

Photo credit: Jochen Wolters via a Creative Commons license.

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Numbers

By Michal Rubin

Mohammed, Wadia,
two brothers
Ala Asous, Hazaa, Rami, Ahmed,
four brothers
six cousins
Rizkallah,
seventh cousin,

one missile,
hundred shards of glass,
one ambulance,
one mass funeral,
one village,
one sleepless night
at Muthalath al-Shuhada

I wish my body moved,
shook the numbers off,
22452600
my passport number,

two,
Yehoshua and Rivka, my grandparents,
two,
Rachel and Mimi, my aunts,
they did not get a number,
no ink wasted on their arms
four
bullets outside one small town
in Poland

five
o’clock,
a huge explosion
two
social workers come to help
six
lost parents
a sleepless night at Muthalath al-Shuhada

Stop reading the news,
I am told

counting
countless
counts,
the many zeroes,
trailing digits,
I am lost
with the numbers

Michal Rubin is an Israeli, living in Columbia, SC. The impetus for her writing came from the years-long Israeli-Palestinian conflict. As a psychotherapist, a Cantor and a poet, she brings forth the challenge of distinguishing truths from myths, awareness vs. denial, conformity vs. individuation. Her work was published in Psychotic Education, The Art and Science of Psychotherapy, Wrath Bearing Tree journal, Rise Up Journal, Topical Poetry, Fall-Lines, The Last Stanza Poetry Journal, Waxing & Waning: A Literary Journal, South Carolina Bards Poetry Anthology 2023, Palestine-Israel Journal, and a chapbook published by Cathexis Northwest Press.

Photo credit: Abacus courtesy of the British Museum.

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Baptism

By Shieva Salehnia

The fountain in the middle of Washington Square Park has not always been there, just as I have not always been here standing next to it.

In the middle of the park, I climb inside the edge of the fountain’s lips. I lean back against them, cool slick stone. The bubbling center spray spurts, streams, arcs, rushing into the filthy city sky, plumes so massive, they bring the smell of the ocean.

The water washes off the weight of people’s attention, the unrelenting mess of the city off my ankles, swollen and ashen from the heat and sticky grime of each sidewalk I pressed my soul against to get here.

100 years ago, the star magnolias didn’t grow on the trees at the parks’ edge. But now the flower beds bloom with bluebells and red and yellow lipped tulips.

We are transplants, the bluebells, the fountain and I. Yet, we are each a perfect manifestation here. Nature never gives up. I remind myself I am part of nature.

April 2023

Raised in South Dakota by my Iranian-immigrant parents, I was brought up to deeply appreciate poetry, especially in the lyrical traditions of the Southwest Asia and North Africa region. I write poetry to define and redefine myself, as a means of liberation, and to allow others to feel less alone in their own uncommon and mundane experiences. I currently live in Los Angeles, where I publish and co-edit a literary zine called Embryo Concepts, and am writing an upcoming comic series called Girl Crazy about the adventures of two queer women living in New York City.

Photo credit: Rich Herrmann via a Creative Commons license.

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Inside the Serotonin Industrial Complex

By Dick Westheimer

“The only winning move is not to play.”
—from the movie War Games

“You can’t call it anything else. It’s just slavery.”
—Calvin Thomas, who spent more than 17 years at the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, Louisiana, working the fields and cattle processing facilities as part of his terms of incarceration.

When I shop these days, especially
online, it feels so much like playing
inside a video game. There, my avatar
only dies when it runs out of coin,

and to level up all I need is ISP speed
and free delivery for stuff I didn’t know about
until it came up in my feed. This
is first-person-shooter shit. Point and click

on new Bluetooth earbuds and a child miner
in the DRC falls in a pit. Need some chicken
wings? An inmate at Angola State Pen,
gets crushed in the gears

of a feather plucking machine. A sack
of flour in my cart? Or Frosted Flakes? Outside
an Arkansas lock-up, a pennies-per-day guy
in an orange jump suit has his skull cracked

by a truncheon. Everyone is in the game.
Some hands are on PCs, some on business
plans, some on guns, some bloody and raw
pulling rocks from the ground. This is the age

where my shopping cart is filled
by clicks—of leg-iron shackles
and handcuff hasps, of cell door locks
and a rifle’s trigger lifting.

This is the age of tantalum and tin,
of Archer Daniels Midland enslaving
someone’s kin, of Tony the Tiger
and Androids and the Mac laptop

I’m typing on—which leaks the tears
of some boy or girl or man who will
never be paroled. It’s the double
chocolate cookies I’ve made

from flour ground from the nightmares
of an old guy working the fields
of Parchman. It’s the cotton sheets

I sleep on woven out of inmates’ dreams.
It’s hope weeded from the red-clay fields
near Angola’s gates. Point & Click:
Same-minute shipment of serotonin—

squeezed from every human animal
chained inside my video game.
Point. Click. Drop in another coin,
keep playing the game

until I’ve won. Keep playing
the game until I’ve won. Point.
Click. Keep playing the game.

Dick Westheimer lives in rural southwest Ohio. He is winner of the 2023 Joy Harjo Poetry Prize, a Rattle Poetry Prize finalist, and Pushcart and Best of the Net nominees. His poems have appeared or upcoming in Whale Road Review, Rattle, OneArt, Abandon Journal, Stone Poetry Quarterly, and Minyan. His chapbook, A Sword in Both Hands, Poems Responding to Russia’s War on Ukraine, was published by SheilaNaGig. More at www.dickwestheimer.com.

Photo credit: Sarah Starkweather via a Creative Commons license.

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Two Poems by Saheed Sunday

a daggerpoint

& what is salvation
if not how we give our body to beauty
to the memory of what does not rust
—Othuke Umukoro

the Sunday before this one, the catechist
warned about hellfire and its odor of smoky taste.
he said it would come unto us like the clouds,
breaking off whatever remains of our clear sky.
the next Sunday, i hear the flowers in my head wilt.
i smell the aftershave of smokes and i bury my
head into my brown palms, begging to be virused out
of all my sins. apparently, what the catechist didn’t
warn us about is that it isn’t only hell that breaks
the bond between a father and his son. the heavy
artillery fire of war can do the same.

in my mother tongue, a poem is a battlefield.
here: every stanza of this poem is an equivalent
of the demarcation line between who survived the last
war and who didn’t. here: every line in this poem
is an equivalent of the rows of my brothers and sisters’
bodies buried by their own homes. here: every word
in this poem is a noose around we survivors’ necks:
a prayer translated into a gun or a death toll.

this stanza is intentionally left blank for all the bodies
we lost to the soil and gun wounds.

something in my head is whispering. it says
in Darfur, every civilian is a moving bait slowed
by thorns in front of a cocked gun. it says in Merowe,
tears are the new ways to know you haven’t been
claimed yet by the fighter jets roaring in the sky above.
for now, ignore the dead butterflies falling off your
chest and supplicate to god. hell is not a thing
you want to witness twice.

In which a country becomes a song that dies on your skin

in this war of a country,
flames die and are reborn as hell,
songs die and are reborn as bullets.

this is a way to say
that everything cool, here,
becomes balls of fire raining

our heads into confusion.
once as a boy, i sat and watched
how a home can turn into the mouth

of a tiger that eats men alive;
how a home can become the mouth
of a grave that swallows its own sons,

& dead bodies, & dead roses.
growth didn’t come with seasonings.
i do know now why my father heaves

a large breath every night before
he shuts his eyes.
that must have been the weight

of his grief leaving his body
till the next day. today i brought out
a palette, and painted quranic verses

on every part of my body that hasn’t burned
to the heated flame of this hell i call a country.

i know what it means to be born
in the middle of a war. i know what it
means to become mouths slashed into songs

of peace & harmony. fa inna maha-l-usri yusrah.
this darkness that illumes the sky will soon
be chased by light. & the breath i hold

will be ridden of every scent of the war
i’ve fought. lord, let victory songs find
a space between my jaws tomorrow.

lord, right this story till there is no space left.

Saheed Sunday, NGP V, a Nigerian writer, is a Pushcart Prize nominee, a Best of the Net nominee, a Star Prize awardee, and a Hilltop Creative Arts Foundation member. He has his work published in Lolwe, Strange Horizons, Trampset, The Deadlands, North Dakota Quarterly, Shrapnel Magazine, and others.

Photo credit: Bruno Alcantara via a Creative Commons license.

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Caught in the Crossfire of a Madding Crowd

By J.D. Harlock

caught in the crossfire of a madding crowd,
the child runs
into the arms of her mother
and nestles herself
‘neath a limp arm
drenched in blood, dreading
the glare of the machine
that scans the corpses
of the agitators
that dared to disturb
the order
it was programmed to maintain, and
as the child cries out for
the security her mother had promised her
here, on the streets of the city
she has spent her entire life in,
the machine stares her right in the eye
with its recalibrating sensors
and offers to return her home safely

J.D. Harlock is an Lebanese American writer, editor, researcher, and academic, currently pursuing a doctorate at the University of St. Andrews. In addition to their work at Solarpunk Magazine as a poetry editor, and at Android Press as an editor, J. D. Harlock’s writing has been featured in Strange Horizons, Nightmare Magazine, New York University’s Library of Arabic Literature, and the SFWA Blog. You can find them on LinkedIn, Twitter, Threads, and Instagram.

Photo credit: Photo by Brett Wharton on Unsplash.

A note from Writers Resist

Thank you for reading! If you appreciate creative resistance and would like to support it, you can make a small, medium or large donation to Writers Resist from our Give a Sawbuck page.

Gauze

By Lisa Suhair Majaj

when you learn that “gauze” comes from Gaza
you will begin to understand how light
passing through translucent fabric illuminates
the delicate porous openings between threads
that interweave to allow molecules of air
and light to flow from one place to another
without blockade or border, and you will learn
how gauze allows us to see, though dimly,
through the haze of grief shrouding
what is soft and vulnerable, like the length
of fabric a child steals from her mother
to drape across a table for a hideaway,
peering out without understanding
what is happening, too young to know,
yet, that there is no hiding in Gaza,
and through this haze you may be able
to glimpse the ones still alive this morning
before the bombs found them, murmuring
about hunger and the absence of bread,
the softness within them reverberating
like an echo past their now-crushed bodies,
and as you turn away in anguish or despair
or shame perhaps you will remember
that gauze is also used to cover wounds,
layering gently over the bleeding place,
of which Gaza has so many we cannot
stop counting, and perhaps you too
will begin to see through the haze
of denial and scream STOP

Lisa Suhair Majaj, a Palestinian American, is the author of Geographies of Light (2008 Del Sol Press Poetry Prize), poems and essays in many journals and anthologies across the US, Europe, and the Middle East, and two children’s books. She is also a scholar of Arab American literature, and co-editor of three volumes of critical essays on Arab, Arab American, and other international women of color writers. Her poetry has been translated into a number of languages, including Arabic, and was displayed as part of the 2016 exhibition “Aftermath: The Fallout of War—America and the Middle East” (Harn Museum of Art). Her grandmother came from Jaffa and her father, born in Birzeit, grew up in Jerusalem. Majaj was born in the US, grew up in Jordan, studied in Lebanon during the war years, evacuated on a refugee boat during the 1982 Israeli invasion and was abducted to Israel for interrogation, and then spent 20 years in the US. Since 2001, she has lived in Cyprus, as close to Palestine as she can get.

Photo credit: Liz West via a Creative Commons license.

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Thank you for reading! If you appreciate creative resistance and would like to support it, you can make a small, medium or large donation to Writers Resist from our Give a Sawbuck page.

Ofrenda for Resistance

By Jordan Alejandro Rivera

Tier I: Inframundo

Poppy and cempasúchil petals
Intermingled as our destinies
Blood, bones, and stems
Obsidian spearheads
And shattered sugar skulls

Tier II: Tierra

Tomatoes, white sapotes, and olives
Laid out on a lattice-patterned scarf
Ten thousand and forty-three
Candles flicker in harmony
Guiding us here together
Wax binds our food

Tier III: Cielo

A black-and-white photo of us
Before our disappearances
And now, finally,
We found our way back home.

Jordan Alejandro Rivera is a 23-year-old queer Chicano writer living in Boston. Jordan is passionate about mutual aid and is involved with the Prison Book Program. Having studied Biology at NYU, he now works as a medical researcher. He has poetry forthcoming in Metachrosis, partially shy, and Acedia Journal. Find him on X/Twitter @jordinowrites.

Photo credit: Miguel Angel Ruiz via a Creative Commons license.

A note from Writers Resist

Thank you for reading! If you appreciate creative resistance and would like to support it, you can make a small, medium or large donation to Writers Resist from our Give a Sawbuck page.