Poetry – Page 2 – Writers Resist

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In Pillars, the Prized City

By Maira Faisal

“You ask: What is the meaning of ‘homeland’?

“They will say: The house, the mulberry tree, the chicken coop, the beehive, the smell of bread, and the first sky.

“You ask: Can a word of eight letters be big enough for all of these, yet too small for us?”

— from In the Presence of Absence by Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish

V. Hajj (pilgrimage)
Stare.

Lock your eyes with mine,
my irises your kaleidoscope

to seek the fractal of Palestine,
absorb the reflection of rubble
staining a land of holy sites,

as apathy-plagued publics
state politics aren’t their forte
while forts, any flickers of shelter,
are licked by the blister of flames,

as the meek, soothed, enchanted
by time’s beguiling hands, (too
often) reject martyrs for monsters:
why run from dark, little things
when one can become a reaper?

IV. Sawm (fasting)
Gaze upon Gaza—

setting sun, a crimson cast
on a mother wiping blood off tile
delicately, lovingly, whispering it
is her Muhammad’s, her son’s last

scrubs clinging to a physician
saying postpartum equals
a hysterectomy, not recovery,
axing branches to save trees

small hearts clattering in small rib cages,
pumping—tick-tick-tick-tick-tick
till they still and stop, slumped bodies
exceeding 5,000 in forty days

children, his flesh and soul,
sealed in grocery bags as severed
limbs, sans warmth and dreams,
visit their Papa in his

carpet bomb flashes and
white phosphorus clouds and
climbing death tolls and

hospital attacks and
church bell chimes and

pets sunk in soot and

and

Israeli officials cheer,
soldiers dance,
civilians chant, “Who has no
electricity, food, water?”

because both sides are
blackened, empty-stomached,
longing for civility

but one thinks the other savages
and ravages, yes, one thirsts for water,

the other hungers for blood.

III. Zakat (charity)
The ummah is one:

“When any limb aches,
the whole body reacts
with sleeplessness and fever.”

Boycotts and banners,
we will not mind manners,

and are marching in streets

Warsaw, Ottawa, Rome,
Lahore, Dublin, Washington,
Istanbul, Doha, Eindhoven

posting for peace

#freepalestine
#savegaza
#stopapartheid

forgoing niceties

“There are NO Two Sides to Genocide”
“End the Palestinian Holocaust”
“Bombing Civilians is a War Crime.”

We, the phantom feet of Palestine,
bastions that won’t sterilize speech
nor forget grotesque portraits of grief—

the tempest-tost, we hear,
and offer aid and alms,
support and a salam.

II. Salah (prayer)
Injuries like rotten peach flesh,
cries absconding sinew,

each second expiates sins,
each breath, an act of worship.

Fajr, Dhuhr, Asr, Maghrib, Isha’a,
takbir, qiyyam, ruku, sujud, tashahud,

dawn, noon, midday, dusk, nightfall,
stand, recite, bow, prostrate, sit.

Death lies in the sky.
Palestine rises as it’s razed.

I. Shahada (faith)
In wisps, it sinks from welkin,
seething and seizing around
the cracks of the prized city,
lodging into stalled lungs,
a tide, a tether,

a profession of faith,
smile of iman before burial,
another seed of watermelon:
tough as rind, sweet as fruit,

red as a phoenixing dawn,
with a spring-dandelion sun
cawing wondrously,

“From the river to the sea,
Palestine will be free.”

Stare where, from the debris,
an iris grieves a poppy,

and opens like a cupped palm.

Maira Faisal is a Kentucky Youth Poet Laureate representative, a sophomore at Northern Kentucky University, and a writer. Her work has been recognized by multiple university journals, Hanging Loose Press, and the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards. As a Pakistani American and Muslim, her pieces often address Islamophobia—especially as it relates to current events such as the Palestinian genocide and Kashmiri repression.

Photo credit: Marius Arnesen 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.

Two Poems by Lonav Ojha

To Refaat Alareer,
who became a kite

Brother, you looked so loving,

holding very gently

that box of

strawberries, and behind

your home, not yet,

not again,

but incessantly

in ruins.

You were not a number,

you were,

an educator,

a cheerful poet,

settler’s boogeyman,

and now that you’re dead, English is also

a language for mourning.

A strike occurs in a medium

it does not

simply

………

….

…

fall.

And your words

hang in air

heavier than any

gravity bombs.¹

1. American

• • • • • • • • • •

A letter to a friend explaining the student movement

I have been listening

to more Bollywood these

days. I have been writing Press Statements

for the Press that does not state what

must be stated. I live in despair. And I

sometimes wish I didn’t have to, but hearing

love songs, Bollywood love songs, without

having anybody to love in a Bollywood sort of way,

means I’m hoping to learn a few things

about romancing myself.

A newly made friend

told me

during the protests that he’s serious about

killing himself, & he was writing

a letter, and another

said she’s cutting herself after many years.

The first person, we don’t talk anymore, because I have

nothing to say.

They’re still alive. I am also still alive.

I am listening to Bollywood songs. I am writing

Press Statements.

I am talking to L, and he says,

the Vice-Chancellor is planning something

HUGE!!

He’s been flying back and forth to Delhi. He,

is a bastard, and I’m listening

to Bollywood songs, and I’m doing alright.

And I’m trying to love my friends, the ones I can,

the ones who can love me.

Long live that look

on your face, and mine. I am

listening to Bollywood

songs, and I’m imagining someone

who would have me fully.

I suffer egregiously from the main character

syndrome. I suffer from having faith

in people. Long live the crane

behind the Magis block that spent a year

building what it will never occupy.

Long live the cats in the New Academic Block

that don’t give a shit. So I am

writing Press Statements. I’ve always

danced in my room,

when nobody’s watching,

when the world is burning,

and I haven’t stopped.

Lonav Ojha is a 22-year-old writer from India. His work has previously appeared on ASAP Art, Agents of Ishq, LiveWire, and The Open Dosa. He was also longlisted for the 2024 TOTO Awards for Creative Writing in English. He writes regularly on his personal blog, Stories Under My Bed, where he attempts to reimagine resistance from the praxis of joy and education. Since the 2014 national elections, his country has plunged into the depths of Hindutva fascism, crushing dissent in all its varied expressions and stifling whatever remained of academic freedom in public universities.

Photo credit: Magne Hagesæter 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.

Jannah is a single strand. My father is the complementary prognosticator strand.

By Abdulrazaq Salihu

3’ 5’
Jannah has seven gates. My father is dead. A dirty cutlass
My people would enter through all. Stabbed into his flesh. My father
Jannah is thirsty. Is dead. Gun to the head, bullet
My people are water. Jannah is shahada. To his skull. My father is dead
My people died in sujood. Jannah is a I cannot unsee the terror. A flood
Myth. My people are the fate. Jannah Cleanses itself with my father’s blood
Is the road, my people are the destinations.               My father is dead. Who did this to me
Jannah is a miracle by the mouth of a Father is gone. Gun too soon. Gone.
Wound. My people are casualties. The Lokoja sands open and swallow
Jannah is a gun, my people are bullets. My father, but he’s only gone when I
Shoot your shot or give the gun, Believe. My brother sees Pa in dreams
Jannah is silence. My people I tell him dreams are only dreams until
Are dead. My people are gone. We believe. My father is gone. Jannah
My people are pebbles Is jannah because my father is gone,
The size of light. Jannah Because light left us black,
Is a gift. My people unwrap. Jannah Because my father is a blue light
Is touch. My people: shy flowers, fold. Full of tenderness. My father is dead
Jannah is poison. My people are milk. Jannah is jannah. My father is jannah.
Jannah is black stripe against the skin                       My father is the only door: enter
Of white music. My people are songs. Through shahada. Through my father’s
My people are sins. Jannah is forgiveness. Delicate skin. Jannah is an RNA strand,
Jannah is jannah because my father died.                  My father is the complement.
Jannah needs my father………………………………………My father needs his people.

Jannah is the gap between my thumb and index. My people are songs the size of quiet.
5’ 3’

Abdulrazaq Salihu, TPC I, is a Nigerian poet and member of the Hilltop Creative Arts Foundation. He won the Splendours of Dawn Poetry Foundation’s poetry contest, BPKW Poetry Contest, Poetry Archive Poetry Contest, Masks Literary Magazine Poetry Award, Nigerian prize for teen authors (poetry), Hilltop Creative Writing Award, and others. He has received fellowships and residencies from IWE Writers Residency, SPRING, and elsewhere. He has work published or forthcoming in Strange Horizons, Unstamatic, Bracken, Poetry Quarterly, Rogue, B’K, Jupiter Review, Black Moon Magazine, Angime, Grub Street, and elsewhere. He tweets @Arazaqsalihu; Instagram, @Abdulrazaq._salihu. He’s the author of Constellations (poetry) and Hiccups (prose).

Photo credit: BBC, under “Fair Use” for commentary.

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.

Slowcookery

By Amy L. Bernstein

“Because when it comes to truly explaining racial injustice in this country, the table should never be set quickly” – Nikole Hannah-Jones, “What is Owed,” New York Times Magazine, 2020

I stand on the far shore of the fast-moving
Combahee River,
opposite the Collective,

afforded a distant glimpse through a lead-paned window
into a snug, low-slung house on the riverbank where

Barbara, Demita, Beverly,
Sharon, Cheryl, Margo, Gloria
are in the kitchen
crowded hip to hip
making dinner to please themselves

the roast has just gone in to
marinate in its juices,

the carrots and potatoes will grow
fork-tender

but not for hours,
not until the pan is bubbling

I see them drinking wine and dancing
slowly
the river moves fast,
conveying time along wet ribs

and the ever-echoing shots of Harriet’s raid

but inside the house,
all is marination

the womyn are steeped in life—
schooled and schooling others

they slip in and out of the
dining room,

setting the table for dinner
one plate cup fork knife at a time,

for nothing about this meal is
taken for granted,
handed out,
handed over

it is so-so-so not easy
yet will be savored
by them
in their own good time

as the Combahee parades
its flowing witness.

Amy L. Bernstein writes stories, essays, and poems that let readers feel while making them think. Her novels include The Potrero Complex, the award-winning The Nighthawkers, Dreams of Song Times, and Fran, The Second Time Around. Amy’s poetry has appeared in Yellow Arrow Journal, Loch Raven Review, Lost Boys Press, Parliament Literary Journal, Passaic-Voluspa, She Is Kindred, and elsewhere, and in an anthology chapbook, Baltimore, I (want to) Love You.

Image credit: “Through Forests, Through Rivers, Up Mountains” by Jacob Lawrence 1967, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C.

Editor’s notes:

Read about Harriet Tubman and the Combahee Ferry Raid of 1863.

Read the “Combahee River Collective Statement.”

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.

The Whale

By Kerry Loughman

never budged

becalmed she was

bleached by sun

& beached on relentless rise

of blue water liquid leeched

from her eyes her orifices

her great mouth agape

her lungs did evaporate

Climate-changed her

wishes drowned

in sand

Kerry Loughman is a retired educator and photographer living in the Boston area. She writes about memory, art, family, and nature in the city, looking for small transient moments of beauty . . . or discord. Her work has appeared in Mass Poetry’s The Hard Work of Hope and Poem of the Moment, Nixes’ Mate, What Rough Beast, The Main Street Rag and is forthcoming in Lily Poetry Review.

Image credit: “The Whale” by Christopher Michel 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.

Two Poems by Linda Parsons

How a Woman Becomes Herself

When the neighbor’s weed tree drapes over the power lines and shades her garden, she contemplates going out by moonlight to dump salt on the roots—but that could backfire and flow instead into the garden, be its ruination. These good neighbors invite her over for fine smoked brisket and can’t even see the problem from their side, so why doesn’t she just grow a pair and tell them, but she takes the aluminum ladder and reaches to the highest branches she can lop off with her superloppers, so maybe they will see her teetering and mistake her for a dragonfly. Truth be told, she’s out there iridescing for her ownself and no one else, her own muscles braided in the sun, yes, muscles at seventy, her arches hugging the top step, balanced as the scales in her Libra rising, Libra the sign of lovingkindness, and maybe they’ll hear her prayer for a little rain, a prayer that some of the body’s salt sours a root or two—because she’s no old wife in this tale, no wife at all, and who can say how it pours when it rains, how in the end it all comes out in the wash—weed, pride, sweat—all but the wings, or the shadow of wings.

Sassafras

Don’t you be sassafras, my daughter
says to her daughters, and so it goes,
straight from my mother’s shush of seen
and not heard, my mouth not to dispute

her word. Now a woman of a certain age,
word-hunger rages to depths even I
cannot sound, tongue burnt with all
manner of truths: a voice unrecused

to witness, laced with cinnamon bark,
cardamon fire, tea for fatigue and fever.
I speak my palmate self, canopy untold,
oils applied to sting and sprain,

my unquiet seams. I purify the blood,
neither sugar nor spice, but healing sear
for whatever stubborn wound the world
hands out. More than match struck

to tinder, more than knocking on wood’s
door long enough to shatter the walls,
more than sass or backtalk or sulled-up lip
or any tabula rasa, I will be sassafras

and more, all that indisputable more.

Poet, playwright, essayist, and editor, Linda Parsons is the poetry editor for Madville Publishing and the copy editor for Chapter 16, the literary website of Humanities Tennessee. She is published in such journals as The Georgia Review, Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, Southern Poetry Review, Terrain, The Chattahoochee Review, Baltimore Review, Shenandoah, and American Life in Poetry. Her sixth collection, Valediction, contains poems and prose. Five of her plays have been produced by Flying Anvil Theatre in Knoxville, Tennessee.

Image credit: Erich Ferdinand 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.

Wildness Unafraid

By Tim Murphy

What if trees could talk?
No. Of course they do.
What if we could hear
them speak
just beneath our feet?

What if birds of all feathers
who lift the sky with song
and frame it with flight
told us
what names to call them?

What if we could simply bathe
in wonder at the coyote’s
wild music of the night,
not needing to demonize
to feel alive?

What if we listened deeply,
heeding the ancient wisdom
of the many worlds unknown
contained in this one
we don’t own?

What if we let other beings
live alongside us
outside the long, lonely shadows

cast by our fear
of our own wildness?

Tim Murphy (he/him) is a disabled civil rights attorney, environmentalist, and poet who lives in Portland, Oregon. His writing explores the natural world, disability, and the climate crisis. Tim’s work is featured in Remington Review, Livina Press, and The Long Covid Reader, a collection published in November 2023. Tim can be found on Instagram and Twitter, @brokenwingpoet.

Image credit: “Howl” by U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

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.

Wrong Rainbow

By L. Acadia

Describing our droomhuis for Dutch class, my
worksheet filled with my dream house’s garden:
Hollyhocks, hydrangea higher than I,
wrought iron table for morning coffee,
serenading birds, frogs ringing a pond.
My love wrote an interior my mind
couldn’t fit: puppy-claw impervious
tile floors, dormer bedroom, dinner-party
primed kitchen, postprandial dancing space.

Years later, we recall the exercise,
tossing balkon, keuken, venster, fit now
to a dream house: open-plan high-ceilinged
flat—wood beams leading the gaze towards mountains,
snug loft for out-of-town or drunken friends,
green balcony, community garden,
busses to work: a millennial dream.

Rooftop looking out to summer salons
poetry, perhaps acoustic guitar.
Headlights flooding the street below create
a waterfall of light, mist spraying to stars.

We call our droomhuis “Jesus house” for the
forest of crosses, scandalous portraits
of unfashionably long-haired white men with
palm-wounds. The seller greets us cordially,
his wife places hands over their kids’ chests,
as though guarding their hearts from our inter-
racial lesbianism’s tick’ling daggers.

When they ghosted our offer, we enquired
through a new realtor. The Jesus house dad
asked, “are your clients a normal couple?”
Nee.

L. Acadia is a lit professor at National Taiwan University and member of the Taipei Poetry Collective, with poetry in Autostraddle, New Orleans Review, Strange Horizons, trampset, and elsewhere. Twitter and Instagram: @acadialogue

Image credit: Jim Choate 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.

Two Poems by Deborah Hochberg

Congregation of Ibis

“A barrage of storms has resurrected what was once the largest body of fresh water west of the Mississippi River, setting the stage for a disaster this spring.”

– from “Tulare Lake Was Drained Off the Map. Nature Would Like a Word,” Soumya Karlamangla and Shawn Hubler, New York Times, April 2, 2023

They drained the Great Lake
in the late 19th century

Humans took
the vast waters from us
to grow their cotton, their tomatoes

Like gods, they separated
the land and the skies from the water
and the water was no more

They came, and they took
what was ours
and we had no say

And they did what they willed
with the earth

And the earth was obedient
for decades, over a century

And then the earth decided —
I have had enough
I am taking it back
I miss the lake
I will bring back the lake

And the atmospheric rivers
raged through the skies

And the land received the waters
waters that the mammoths
once drank

The farms, homes, brewery, and cafe
the crops and ranches
were inundated

And then we returned —
the ibis
and the herons, pelicans, and coots

Soon the snowpack will melt
without mercy
for agriculture
or prisons

The lake, like a surging
aqueous ghost, a watery resurrection
has again staked its claim

And we are here —
as long as the lake
can sustain its deep
irriguous expanse

Migrant Child

Home
is a thing
that does not yet exist
Existed as a point of departure
But a home
where one cannot live
is not a home
My feet are my home
My legs are my home
My sneakers are my home
They carry me
through arduous terrains
that seek to have me
lie down
and sink
into the mud
Mud-child
I hold my own hand
This way, I say
No, this way
Journey of a thousand steps
Countless steps, numerous
as stars in the sky
Stars that blanket me
on cold nights
No longer human
I move through the mud
like a turtle
Did I just crawl
over a border?
I have forgotten
thoughts of home
and now think only
of movement
This journey, a trial
and I am guilty
of what I do not know
Hope
is a thing
that grips you
around your throat
Pulls you
like a leash
and won’t let go

Deborah Hochberg is from Detroit, Michigan, and studied at Wayne State University. She is a musician, a gardener, and a health care provider. She is the author of two collections of poetry entitled Waiting For the Snow and Memory’s Reservoir.

Image credit: Bob Peterson 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.

what happened before the good sex

By Bryana Joy

for God’s sake no more games
she said setting the last set
of lace panties in the trash

i am befuddled by all this
rigmarole this muddle this hullabaloo
she threw a negligee out the door
and all of her lipstick tubes

i am i the only one
you are you the only one
my house is as you see it
if you want to come in
Come

Bryana is a poet and illustrator who has lived in Türkiye, Texas, and England, and now resides in Eastern Pennsylvania. Her poetry has appeared in more than 50 literary journals, and her book, Summer of the Oystercatchers, is forthcoming from Fernwood Press. Since 2021, she has been teaching regular online poetry workshops to foster meaningful arts community and support writers. Find her at www.bryanajoy.com or on Instagram and Threads at @_bryana_joy.

Image credit: Public domain

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.

that name

By William Palmer

tide in—

imagine
waves scraping away

that name
and the lies upon lies

that feed off it,
dissolving them in foam

imagine
the mugshot gone

the blue suits gone
the long red ties

around our country’s neck
gone

William Palmer’s poetry has appeared recently in JAMA, J Journal, One Art, On the Seawall, Talking River Review, and The Westchester Review. He lives in Traverse City, Michigan.

Image credit: Sean P 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.

Point Blank

An Illustrated Poem by Jane Muschenetz

MIT grad and former Bain Management Consultant, Jane Muschenetz arrived in the United States as a child refugee from Soviet Ukraine. She is a 2023 City of Encinitas Exhibiting Artist and winner of The Good Life Review 2022 Poetry Prize. Her debut poetry collection, All the Bad Girls Wear Russian Accents (Kelsay, 2023), was shortlisted for the Jacar Press Chapbook Prize. Jane is Director of Partnerships at San Diego Entertainment & Arts Guild and Co-Founder of the San Diego Chapter of Women Who Submit Lit. Connect with Jane’s work at her website, www.PalmFrondZoo.com, and in various publications. Follow her on social media @PalmFrondZoo.

1 Incident of firearm mortality per 100K population by global developed economies, https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2022-us-gun-violence-world-comparison/. M.McGough, K. Amin, N. Panchal, C. Cox, “Child and Teen Firearm Mortality in the U.S. and Peer Countries,” KFF.org, Jul, 2022; https://www.kff.org/global-health-policy/issue-brief/child-and-teen-firearm-mortality-in-the-u-s-and-peer-countries/; USA child+teen data from 2020.

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.

The Last Revolution

By Lorraine Schein

The Last Revolution was yesterday.
It was so successful, that all future revolutions were cancelled forever.

A lesbian and her lover were elected President and Vice-President.
Their lovemaking is televised nationally as part of the inaugural proceedings
and greeted with applause by an appreciative at-home audience.

Poets have been elected to Congress. It is now a requirement for election to any political office that the candidate be a poet.
Poems are published in every daily newspaper and online.
Headlines announce the dates of public readings and news about famous poets.

Crowds go to hear poets the way they used to go to see rock stars or football games.
They cheer loudly, in iambic pentameter, for their favorite poet.

“I can’t wait to go to tomorrow’s poetry reading!” people say,
and tickets are sold out months in advance.

Work has been abolished by the smashing of clocks and digital time devices.
Now there can be no office work, or work at all, since there is no way
of measuring a workday.

The gods and goddesses return, and run rampant.

Children and animals are allowed to run for president also.
Next election day, a little girl and her teddy bear running-mate
look to be the winning ticket.

For toys have been given equal rights and a voice, too—
in what matters most.

Lorraine Schein is a New York writer and poet. Her work has appeared in VICE Terraform, Strange Horizons, NewMyths and Michigan Quarterly, and in the anthologies Wild Women and Tragedy Queens: Stories Inspired by Lana del Rey & Sylvia Plath. The Futurist’s Mistress, her poetry collection, is available from Mayapple Press. Her book, The Lady Anarchist Cafe, is available from Autonomedia.

Image credit: Beatrice Murch 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.