Poetry – Page 21 – Writers Resist

Rage Vow

By Cesca Janece Waterfield

Hang a wreath on my maiden door, pubic-black and furled,
a bough to say someone has passed over. Bury her pleats
and sweet sestinas among spring narcissus, and if you recall
the flush, soft breast that slipped free in primeval joy,

do not depend on the moon of her aureole now.
There are idiots here, whirling under Mother Ginger’s skirt.
They affirm life on a pedestal proportionately placed
between an embowelment station and a crematory. They stomp

down marbled halls with whirligigs and gee-haws scrawled Freedom,
but their whirring gadgets bear no discernible resemblance
to values their buyers hold up in skidding headlights
of their cognitive discord. I too wear the tag, Idiot, which translates

into French as d’Idiot, but still means you either pump your fist
and squawk, Sin! when the queer cashier gets shit-canned
or you scoop up your piddly change and hurry home
to a lukewarm drip of plans to stand up tomorrow, afraid

of being branded angry woman, pushed from her place
in the rank and file with tickets for tyranny and all-you-can-eat.
Lose that lottery and no more triple axle, 9 miles a gallon.
So I kept writing down forgive and om and sweet Jesus,

can I just get a Pap smear? But I swear, when I meet the proselyte
who stands at the ash heap of books and ideals to witness
there’s nothing left to burn and nothing fit for life, I will strike
a match for the animal, ignitable soul.

Cesca Janece Waterfield received an MFA in Creative Writing and an MA in English from McNeese State University. Her fiction and poetry have been published or are forthcoming in journals including Foliate Oak, Blue Collar Review, Deep South Magazine, Inkt|art and more.

Photo credit: Keith Ellwood via a Creative Commons license.

Pantoum for ‘Real America’

By D.A. Gray

The men we knew have long since passed.
Their bodies still fill the broadest doorways
but something in their eyes, their voice has gone
replaced by a rage that crackles over the radio.

Their bodies still fill the broadest of doorways
and their eyes follow us, from great distances.
There’s only the rage that crackles over the radio
where once warm greetings welcomed us.

The old men’s eyes follow us — from a great distance.
Maybe we just remember our small town wrong
or only think the greetings warm that welcomed us
and not simply suspicion in code.

Maybe we just remember our small town wrong
the way bared teeth appear to be a smile sometimes.
Perhaps it’s simply suspicion in code
or we forgot how far we went to save our way of life.

Bared teeth, from here, looked like smiles sometimes.
Tales across the table — the sum of what we knew.
We never questioned the myth of our way of life.
It was simpler, those images in black and white.

Stories across the table were the sum of what we knew.
Now there’s only rage crackling over the radio.
It was simpler then, reality in black and white —
but the minds we knew have long since passed.

D.A. Gray is the author of the new collection of poems, Contested Terrain (FutureCycle Press, 2017) and one previous collection, Overwatch (Grey Sparrow Press, 2011). His poetry has appeared in The Sewanee Review, Grey Sparrow Journal, Appalachian Heritage, Kentucky Review, The Good Men Project, Still: The Journal, War, Literature and the Arts among many other journals. Gray recently completed his graduate work at The Sewanee School of Letters and at Texas A&M-Central Texas. A retired soldier and veteran, the author writes and lives in Central Texas with his wife, Gwendolyn. Visit his website at www.dagray.net.

Image credit: DonkeyHotey via a Creative Commons license.

Two Poems by Laura Orem

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Letter from Guantanamo

Seasons don’t matter except
for the discomfort they bring.
June is just hotter.

The Caribbean thuds against Cuba,
steaming like soup, saltier
than our tears,
if anyone cried here.

Whether we bear it or not,
the pain continues.

The interrogator takes his work
as seriously as Michelangelo
considered the perfect pink
of God’s fingertips.

Once I ate sweet dates and dreamed
of doing something important.

Now the sun, that holy eye,
stares down on the sea and sand,
strikes us blind.

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Radium Girls

We make time luminesce,
our numbers bright as moonglow.

Precise work, oh yes – we lick the brush sharp
after three, after six, then nine, then twelve.

Our quotas absorb us, hunched over the table
ten hours a day, until six o’clock Friday

unlocks us like a key from our benches,
and we are girls again. We splash

giddy magic on our fingertips and hair,
trace brilliant strokes across our eyelids

to dazzle sweet boys on Saturday night.
Such pretty pixies, how we sparkle and dance!

In unseen places, we are cracking and crumbling.
Our bones shatter and burn.

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A note from Laura: If you enjoy knowing that Writers Resist exists, please consider a small contribution, so we can continue to give our writers and artists a little something. Contributions are gratefully accept here. Thanks for reading!

Laura Orem, a poetry editor at Writers Resist, is a poet, essayist and visual artist. She’s the author of Resurrection Biology (Finishing Line Press 2017) and the chapbook Castrata: a Conversation (Finishing Line Press 2014). Laura received an MFA in Writing and Literature from Bennington College and taught writing for many years at Goucher College in Baltimore.

A featured writer at the Best American Poetry blog, Laura’s poetry, essays and art have appeared in many journals, including Nimrod, Zocalo Public Square, DMQ, Everlasting Verses, Blueline, Atticus Review, Barefoot Review, OCHO, and Mipoesias. She lives on a small farm in Red Lion, Pennsylvania with her husband, three dogs, and so many cats she’s afraid to say.

Both poems appear in Resurrection Biology (Finishing Line Press 2017).

Radiolite watches photo credit: Collectors Weekly.

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Cast

By Ruth Nolan

Many bones have been broken here
in the tricky Mojave River quicksand,
huge Cottonwood trees taken down,
gnawed low to the marrow by beavers.

Behind me, the shadow of a man, his
fishing pole slung across his shoulder.
He tells me he will catch crawdads first,
skin and fry a trout or two for dinner.

He asks me to read a fat brown worm
onto his rusty hook. He is ready to fish.
My hands are strong, my fingers shake.

He casts his lure and waits for the first bite.
I snap fat twigs, break branches, build a fire.

A note from Ruth: If you enjoy knowing that Writers Resist exists, please consider a small contribution, so we can continue to give our writers and artists a little something. Contributions are gratefully accept here. Thanks for reading!

Ruth Nolan, a poetry editor at Writers Resist, is a professor of English and Creative Writing at College of the Desert in Palm Desert, California, and an author, lecturer and editor. She worked with the international, United Nations-sponsored literary program Dialogue Through Poetry / Rattapallax Press, from 2001 through 2004, and is now involved with many desert environment organizations as a writer and advocate for environmental justice. She’s the author of the poetry book Ruby Mountain (Finishing Line Press 2016). Her short story, “Palimpsest,” published in LA Fiction: Southland Writing by Southland Writers (Red Hen Press 2016), received an Honorable Mention in Sequestrum Magazine’s 2016 Editor’s Reprint contest and was also nominated for a 2016 PEN Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers.

Ruth’s writing has also been published in James Franco Review; Angels Flight LA/Literary West; Rattling Wall; KCET/Artbound Los Angeles; Lumen; Desert Oracle; Women’s Studies Quarterly; News from Native California; Sierra Club Desert Report, Lumen; The Desert Sun/USA Today and Inlandia Literary Journeys.

Photo credit: Born1945 via a Creative Commons license.

An Old Dog Never Barks at Gunmen

By Bola Opaleke

– Neither should you,

a wise man once said. Even pickaxes
and sledgehammers would do just fine –
like pickaxe-men or sledgehammer-men.

That reminds me of people that left
raising a finger of “revenge my death” up so high

as the bullet-ridden body thuds. What the soldiers
have done to us – young girls –
teaching our heliotropic breasts how to worship the sun,

boys abandoning the fishing rods
for militants’ rifles, men and women

waking up in the morning
to homelessness. A daughter defiled
before the helpless father – his body at twilight,

dangling from a rope hugging a barren tree
his wooden hands never again to cradle a crying child.

I saw a mother rubbing her frail skin with black ash
from her son’s barrow, invoking spirits
of vengeance from that mound. Soldiers

picking our tiniest vein to sew up our lips –
to make us talk in pains – to force us to obey

word count. No soldiers. No! The poor barks
at the Law (that only eavesdrops). These ordinances give
different uniforms to different soldiers

at different levels of our democracy.
These soldiers, wearing different gears –

bath in “constitution of lies.”
But because an old dog never barks at gunmen,
neither do we. “Raise a sword

of rebellion against thieves and murderers,”
wrote a poet,” and watch politics be

white as snow.” Not soaring past
the red line that says: survive or die
because we already fall in love

with “Que Sera Sera” –
that evergreen lyric of consolation

seeping through. Radios and televisions
propagating that wise saying every minute:
“an old dog never barks at gunmen –

neither should you.”

Author’s note: This poem was inspired by the recent incidents surrounding Kenya’s presidential election. And the attack, arrest and imprisonment of the Catalan leaders seeking independence from Spain.

Bola Opaleke is a Nigerian-Canadian poet residing in Winnipeg, MB. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Rattle, Cleaver, One, The Nottingham Review, The Puritan, The Literary Review of Canada, Sierra Nevada Review, Dissident Voice, Poetry Quarterly, The Indianapolis Review, Miracle E-Zine, Poetry Pacific, Drunk Monkeys, League of Canadian Poets (Poetry Month 2013), Pastiche Magazine, The Society, Vol. 10, 2013, St. Peter’s College, University of Saskatchewan, and others. He holds a degree in City Planning.

Photo credit: g0d4ather via a Creative Commons license.

The No-Knock State

By Jemshed Khan

Upon hearing that Barrett Brown was jailed (again)

SWAT teams rumble streets.
Men in black smash down doors.

No one bothered to knock
65,000 times last year:

Hinges ripped from the jamb
with a battering ram or breach grenade.

My friend murmurs,
We live in a Police State,

but I still write and say and read
as I will, as we wait.

He points and whispers,
Someone’s listening at the door.

I hiss back, Surely. Enough. Already.
Though I turn and look to be sure.

Jemshed Khan lives and works in the Kansas City area. Born overseas of immigrant parents, he has experienced American culture both as an outsider and as a participant. He relishes the opportunity that the American dream and society have offered him, but also is alarmed by the rising authoritarian encroachment on privacy and freedom.

Photo credit: Steven Roy via a Creative Commons license.

Abecedarian diatribe: abolish him!

By Gabriel Mianulli

All the problems in the picture are flooding the world
Before we have a chance to construct boats for rescue
Can’t we have more time to sniff out bullshit politics?
Damage has been done, the hurricanes are screaming.
Elsewhere, we build bombs that taste like backward progress.
Forgotten events didn’t sound their alarms in time.
Gander back, at the mistakes we repeat in tired cycles
Hopped up on loud media frenzies, and bad leadership
Individualism is hard to spot in the storm’s eye
Jobs are abrasive, but we should all have them
Kissing the rings of kings, we taste metal and blood—
Long-encrusted crud that stinks of corruption
Macaques fling dung from pedestals, inedible
Noxiously uncreditable. Awful! Foul! Terrible!
Obnoxious assaults on patriotic principles
Penetrated sacred institutions, reeking like swine
Quack! Fraudulent fool, phony puppet! We see the hand!
Revolution is on its way! Any day now … humming.
Scantily clad, it’s just your type, we all needed it.
Tulip-scented, cleaning smudges from your greasy hands
Ubiquitously we shout: Get the fuck out!
Varmint! Squeak your obscenities elsewhere.
We have work to do, that doesn’t include you or your tart
Xanthippe wasn’t xenophobic, and she looked better
Yet somehow here we are; not where we need to be: quiet.
Zaniness is the dull story of our lives these days.

Gabriel Mianulli is a nontraditional Associate of Fine Arts in Creative Writing student living in Minnesota. He daydreams a lot. He writes Fiction, Poetry and Prose, but has been somewhat slow to submit his work. He likes finding quiet spaces to read, exploring the wilderness, and embracing the everyday adventures involved with living in the 21st century. He is currently working on his portfolio between classes and taking it easy. He’d give you a hug if you asked for it.

Image via Imgflip.

Obamaclipse

By Rony Nair

1. Overview

Lopsided dreams coalesce into hazy sunsets,

pretending to droll out Nintendo games played by our new trumped up incantation. The new war boy. Elected of course. by a war room of nominees with shotguns in their bed.

Hawkish foreign policy bytes, words of war, beating up the beaten, hoarse cries from musty rooftops—declaiming glory. feigning peace.

A solar eclipse of armament sales. If there’s no Middle East, North Korea’s our Jerusalem.

2. Prelude

Gas and fuel create their own viewfinder,

eclipses redefine our planes,

we reminisce over Hiroshima and Vietnam and lines crossed in Syria.

we did nothing for the maimed.

Rehearse another beautiful speech for a week later. Weave a wand about history and legacy and myth.

a tin drum sounded better than your inaction. your rhetoric so beautiful that everyman lost your original point,

foreign secretary fly miles were made to order

jet fuel. ambassadors in death, Libyan draught holes. Furtive arrests.

Gulf springs and coattails. Russia. Bust.

sound and fury …

I’ll talk about books instead.

Solar eclipses where the sun ran and hid.

You were lounging, after your dinner speech bid!

Seduction we fell for once, with Camelot. Doled out over misty wordplay and Agent Orange and Apocalypse Now.

Memory. I see you now. Speak. Somehow!

1.1 Overview 2

Presidential donkey days, torrential rains

Sit atop lies and palaver—brain dead Charleston Trucks run amok over segregation benefaction.

Hell, Nazis are our new heroes. Says our new mime.

An old freed slave now joins his masters. declaiming speech upon wasted speech. quoting rhyme.

That Solar eclipses smile

2.1 Memory 2

the years we lost, the years we lost.

To inertial speech and rhyme.

farewell you said, we need valets in bed,

a white plane for a dime.

“it doesn’t behoove me to be verbose” finally you said—

before you boarded your Presidential

To ski with Richard Branson.

3. The End

On eclipse day, we’ll play Golf for fun.

Every week becomes a round. Every round becomes a tweet.

Our foreign policy explained.

140 beats.

Rony Nair has been a worshipper at the altar of prose and poetry for almost as long as he could think. They have been the shadows of his life. He is a poet, photographer and a part-time columnist. His professional photography has been exhibited and been featured in several literary journals. His poetry and writings have previously been featured by Chiron Review, Sonic Boom, The Indian Express, Mindless Muse, Yellow Chair Review, New Asian Writing (NAW), The Foliate Oak Magazine, Open Road Magazine, Tipton Review, and the Voices Project, among other publications. He cites V.S Naipaul, A.J Cronin, Patrick Hamilton, Alan Sillitoe, John Braine and Nevil Shute in addition to FS Fitzgerald as influences on his life; and Philip Larkin, Dom Moraes and Ted Hughes as his personal poetry idols. Larkin’s’ collected poems would be the one book he would like to die with. When the poems perish, as do the thoughts!

Photo credit: Terry Ballard via a Creative Commons license.

Just Like Picking Flowers

By Leslie McGrath

The almond wears a thin corduroy vest
that cannot protect the nut. The skin

of a ripe peach peels like a second
degree burn. The oyster

clenches even as
we break its nacreous wings
at the hinge to get at the meat.

When the mushroom man appeared with baskets
braceleted up to his elbow
that shudder morning

he said the girls knew what to do (the best
mushrooms grew on the north sides of trees)

It was just like picking flowers, he said
and girls were good at that. But the boys

he’d have to show.

He led the boys away

(on his knees he showed them)
(with their pants down he showed them)

and we girls filled our baskets we knew what to do
though we did not know we did not know.

This was how he separated us.

Leslie McGrath is the author of two full-length poetry collections Opulent Hunger, Opulent Rage (2009), and Out from the Pleiades (2014), and two chapbooks. McGrath’s third collection, Feminists Are Passing from Our Lives, will be published in April 2018 by The Word Works. Winner of the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry (2004), she has been awarded residencies at Hedgebrook and the Vermont Studio Center, as well as funding from the CT Commission on the Arts and the Beatrice Fox Auerbach Foundation. Her poems and interviews have been published widely, including in Agni, Poetry magazine, The Academy of American Poets, The Writer’s Chronicle, and The Yale Review. McGrath teaches creative writing at Central CT State University and is series editor of The Tenth Gate, a poetry imprint of The Word Works Press.

Photo credit: James Johnstone via a Creative Commons license.

The Culling Agent

By John Robilotta

I sit on my lanai
three flights above the water’s edge.
Shore life comes and goes.
Black and white ibis,
with their elongated beaks,
feed on the shoreline.
A great blue heron
suns on the far banks.
Anhingas and cormorants dry their wings
atop stone outcroppings.

There is much life about
the water this year,
particularly since the alligator
was removed by a concerned citizen.
Nature requires a culling agent
to keep its balance.
So too does mankind.
Whether it be war, plague or famine,
history teaches that catastrophic events
wean the weak and hungry.

Is such time upon us now?
A new president.
The doomsday clock
pushed toward midnight.
An unsteady hand
poised ever so close
to the codes of a nuclear arsenal.
Mankind, and other creatures,
a knee jerk away
from an ultimate culling.

John Robilotta lives in Sayville, NY, and winters in Ft. Myers, Fl, where he is a member of the Poetry Alliance, part of the Alliance for the Arts of Lee County. He has had poems featured in “The Broadsides” at the Alliance and An Evening of Poetry at the Visual Arts Center in Punta Gorda, Fl. John also has had numerous readings in Ft. Myers and Sayville.

Photo by Andy Hay of the”Famine Memorial” sculpture by Rowan Gillespie, via a Creative Commons license.

Wreak

By Rae Hoffman Jager

To David Wallace-Wells

While we slept, awoke, and made oatmeal,
went to work, walked the dog, and so on,
A crack in the ice shelf grew 11 mile—
raced the ocean where it dropped
with a titanic splash no one heard.

As we make messes, more icebergs calve far off—
tons of carbon released and along with it
prehistoric bacteria and bugs with tentacles
and tusks two feet long.

Even the Doomsday seed vault isn’t safe.
Just years after being built on Spitsbergen,
it flooded. Those small hearts were salvaged,
but that’s not the point—every day

we arm the planet with hotter,
dirtier breath to gag us with.

Is your ulcer heating up yet? —

Bangladesh won’t last the century. Soon,
Mecca will be pan-fried and Haj, a death march.

I guess there is some irony in that we are a lot like ice,
though there is less and less of it to be found: cold,
full of dangerous gas, and indignantly indentured.

Not all the prayers in the world will rehydrate
the kidneys of the El Salvadorian sugar cane fields,
the wilted grains of the west, and dried up river beds—

Just wait.

Author’s note: This is a found poem with words from David Wallace-Wells’ New York magazine article, “The Uninhabitable Earth,” that got the Internet defensive and feeling existential dread.

Rae Hoffman Jager has been in a variety of magazines from Arsenic Lobster to Ambit. In 2014, she won the Cincinnati Library Contest and in 2016 for her poem Tattoos, she read in Salina, Kansas as the New Voice Poet. Rae was named “Reader’s Pick” by Rivet Journal for her poem “Getting Closer to It,” and she joined their poetry staff shortly after. Her chapbook One Throne was released by Five Oaks Press this summer and is available on Amazon and the Five Oaks Press website. Rae’s work has been described as rambunctious, urgent, funny, and elegiac. Visit her website at www.raehoffmanjager.com.

Photo credit: NASA

How the first strangers met the coast guard

By Arturo Desimone

The maritime guards stopped the half-naked,
very tall animal-headed strangers
on their boats
Asked them “Show your papers, please”
“All we have
are these roses.
Yellow and red
given to us, a gift,
they were once showered upon us from the earth
shot from the first catapults, made to launch pure prayer,
to the clouds fecund,
seeds hit us in our faces, wounding our sleep
The throwers expected our thanks.
Flowers were carried to our mouths in our sleep
by the bearers, hoping
flowers of inedible gold would not descend back
that the shadows of the roots
would end in us.”

The guards brandished their weapons, lifting them from the hilt
guns shone like their aerodynamo-sunglasses,
shaven human heads dulled,
touch-screens of their phones bright, all iridescences worn
by opaqued minds of gendarmerie.

“It could be done without any weapon, muscle of titanium tin ton and iron,
muscle of love-borne waxwing-wind
without any of you enacting vapid designs
or tinkering, in defiance of us
and our plans for your present
and future omni-mud” the gods went on

”Remove the animal masks please” asked the police academy justice officers,
interrupting, calling in the higher-ranking managerial levels
of divisional security
and other devils that trample the waves and extolled winds.
They phoned them in
on their pink plastic hand-held radios.

the gods answered—But these are our faces.
Only angels tear off their own heads
Every morning, when it is cool they do it down by the lake

Arturo Desimone, Arubian-Argentinian writer and visual artist, was born in 1984 on the island of Aruba. At the age of 22, he emigrated to the Netherlands, then relocated to Argentina while working on a long fiction project about childhoods, diasporas, islands and religion. Desimone’s articles, poetry and fiction have previously appeared in CounterPunch, Círculo de Poesía (Spanish) Acentos Review, New Orleans Review, and in the Latin American views section of OpenDemocracy. He writes a blog about Latin American poetry for the Drunken Boat poetry review.

Photo credit: Helder Mira via a Creative Commons license.

Landowner

By Andrea Ciannavei

I am not financially literate.
My chaos with money leads me to behave desperately.
Always borrowing.
Always paying back.
A text message came through on Saturday.
A marshal had taken possession of the apartment I kept in New York.
I had been withholding rent. I’m broke.
Eviction proceedings went forward and no one told me.
I’m going to pay. I always do.
Making amends for past wrongs done to others is easier than the ones I am supposed to make to myself.
I am a debtor.
You don’t get more American than me.
The only asset I have is a jeep. No home. No condo. Credit cards maxed.
A renter.
The idea of owning a home makes my mind collapse in on itself.
A hysterical blindness arrives.
Homes and families are not pleasant things. They are heartache and secrets.
They are snake pits full of hissing monotonous gossip.
Choppy sentences. Nimble sidesteps.
The other problem with homes is they have doors.
Nothing good happens behind them when they are closed.

I do own one other thing – I almost forgot:
When I was 16, my mother told me she bought a plot for me at the St.
Francis Cemetery.
Her subconscious is very proactive.
It’s because of her husband. My father.
And her father before him.
Possibly my great-grandfather too but we will never know.
It’s because I was fat and embarrassing. Lane Bryant was the only place we could buy clothes to fit me in the 80s.
She once said to someone after a successful diet I had just completed, that my weight loss was the happiest time in her life.
I am, down to my organs, dropforged by generational sickness and inarticulate rage.
Musty porn magazines in trash bags in the corner of garages.
And now here comes:
Me too. Me too. Me too.
Even more than rapists, molesters, assaulters and the incestuous:
I hate the people who are shocked.
There is a special place in hell for these innocent liars.
What world have they been living in all this time?
And when do I get my one-way ticket there?
Everyone wants to have empathy now.
That’s very nice. But it’s like finally getting the back rent.
Now I know how my New York landlord feels.
All this empathy has finally arrived but it’s 32 years late –
I’ve already cleaned up most of the damage.
Now that everyone wants to listen, I don’t want to tell.
No one gets to hear the details of my incest, or sexual assault when I was 15.
Or being kicked out of an all-girls Catholic school because I made the mistake of telling a girl what happened to me which made her parents mad.
Or the casual harassments on NYC street corners.
Fat asses are low hanging fruit.
No one will hear those details.
None of your business, you know.
Besides, they’re rusted and tangled and thrown willy-nilly
in the little plot of land I own in the St. Francis Cemetery.
My mother wants me buried with the family
but this is all she’s getting:
My jagged metal scrap heap.
I made my friends promise:
Should I die before my parents,
I am to be cremated and tossed into the Pacific Ocean.
No ceremony. No speeches.
Just get rid of the evidence.

Andrea Ciannavei is a Los Angeles-based TV writer and playwright. TV: The Path (Hulu), American Odyssey (NBC Universal), Season 2 of Copper (BBC America), Seasons 1 – 3 of Borgia (Tom Fontana, Executive Producer, Atlantique Creations SASU). Plays include Pretty Chin Up produced at LAByrinth Theater Company (Artistic Directors: Philip Seymour Hoffman and John Ortiz) at The Public Theater. She also traveled on behalf of Pulitzer Prize winner Marsha Norman to Thailand, India, South Africa, Kenya, Congo, Rwanda, Burundi, Egypt, Haiti and Ecuador, to conduct interviews and research on human trafficking, sex slavery, gender violence and socio-political and economic issues that impact women. She is a graduate of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts’ Dramatic Writing Program and Juilliard’s Lila Acheson Playwriting Fellowship 2008-2010. She is a proud member and occupies a seat on the council of WGAE. Visit her website at www.andreaciannavei.com.

Photo credit: Tim Green via a Creative Commons license.

How I Am Not Like Hillary Clinton

By Rachel Custer

The woods call to me, too, from across this road,
from away from here, from the opposite
of houses filled with tired people,

from the constant grasping of small hands
that might as well own me. Who wouldn’t be calmed
by a path through the grabbing branches? Still

I don’t go to the woods, trusting more
in the noisy hate of the known world than in
the cold, true silence of a mirror. Here, in the dark

undergrowth of the mob, I am still afraid, but I am
not alone. Here I can weigh a stone in my throwing hand.
Here I can know the stone won’t be thrown

at me. Fear keeps me from the woods into which
you wade, eyes forward, again and again,
because the woods is silent

as it circles me. Here, with the tired people, I can
say to myself I am only tired, that the stone
in my hand can’t be wrong

if we’re all holding stones.

Rachel Custer’s first full-length collection, The Temple She Became, is available from Five Oaks Press. Other work has previously been published or is forthcoming in Rattle, The American Journal of Poetry, B O D Y, [PANK], and DIALOGIST, among others. She is currently completing the Tupelo Press 30/30 Poetry Marathon fundraiser. Visit her website at www.rachelcuster.wordpress.com.

Photo credit: .waldec via a Creative Commons license.

The Freedom of Mothers Must Come

By Mbizo Chirasha

Pain scribbled signatures in these mothers’ buttocks,
War tied ropes of struggle around these mothers’ necks.
Songs of suffering are sung and unheard
in the congregations of townships and mountains
searching for freedoms’ seeds.
The seeds of these mothers’ wombs yearn for a freedom
too far away to be harvested, but not forgotten.

These mothers’ bodies speak of truth.
These mothers’ bodies carry scars.
These mothers’ dimples are resilient,
These mothers’ smiles and laughter offer hope.
These mothers’ thighs are graffitied with bullet bruises,
the valleys of their backs reek
with the blood of their sons,
sons long buried in barrels of violence
their lives stolen in their greenness.

These mothers’ hands trust the red clay soil,
even during cloudless seasons.
These mothers’ wombs give birth to rays of dawn.
These mothers scribble memories on prison walls with rainbows
These mothers’ shoulders carry the weight of journeys
and hope, which rises ripens dies
and rises again with each new day.

Mothers, how many times can you cough up sorrow?
For how many seasons can you sneeze with hunger?
You have eaten enough poverty
and licked the rough hand of a war long unforgotten
for too many dawns.

These mothers unburden propaganda from their shoulders
delete the baggage of political slogans from their breasts
abort the luggage of war from their wombs
These mothers turn to the hope of reaching pastures
where they can reap the fruits of freedom.

Mbizo Chirasha is an internationally acclaimed performance poet, writer, creative and literary projects specialist, and an advocate of Girl Child Voices and Literacy Development. He is the founder and projects curator of a multiple community, literary, and grassroots projects, including Girl Child Creativity Project, Girl Child Voices Fiesta, Urban Colleges Writers Prize, and Young Writers Caravan. He is widely published in journals, magazines, and anthologies around the world. He co-edited Silent Voices Tribute to Achebe Poetry Anthology, Nigeria, and the Breaking Silence Poetry anthology, Ghana. His poetry collections include Good Morning President, Diaspora Publishers, 2011; and United Kingdom and Whispering Woes of Ganges and Zambezi, Cyberwit Press, India, 2010. He was the Poet-in-Residence from 2001 to 2004 for the Iranian Embassy/UN Dialogue among Civilizations Project; Focal Poet for the United Nations Information Centre from 2001 to 2008; convener/event consultant for This Africa Poetry Night 2004 to 2006; official performance poet Zimbabwe International Travel Expo in 2007; Poet in Residence of the International Conference of African Culture and Development 2009; and official poet SADC Poetry Festival, Namibia 2009. In 2010, Chirasha was invited as an Official Poet in Residence of ISOLA Conference in Kenya. In 2003, Chirasha was a Special Young Literary Arts Delegate of Zimbabwe International Book Fair to the Goteborg International Book Fair in Sweden. He performed at Sida/African Pavilion, Nordic African Institute and Swedish Writers Union. In 2006, he was invited to be the only Poet /Artist in Residence at Atelier Art School in Alexandra Egypt. In 2009, he was a special participating delegate representing Zebra Publishing House at the UNESCO Photo-Novel Writing Project in Tanzania. Visit his website at mbizotheblackpoet.wordpress.com.

Photo credit: James Jordan via a Creative Commons license.

I Promise I’ll Pick Up

By Elisabeth Horan

I’ve been left out

They had a baby shower without me
I’m not pregnant right now but I can still be pretty fun sometimes

They’re constructing a pipeline,
Under rivers of bones and shale
Through the homes of the earthworms

Didn’t ask the worms if that was ok
Didn’t ask me either

They are dissecting my insurance – My taxes My womb, my WIC, my Medicaid, my Safety Net
I am a poor poet you see But I still need some food and my meds
You don’t want to see me without my meds, Senators
And support and maybe even a little respect

I paid taxes, I sure did –
For 20 years as a secretary
First in an otolaryngology clinic, then in an estate planning law firm
They could call me, I would talk

I would tell them:
He’s out at lunch right now, would you like his voice mail?
You can come in to sign your wills at 1:15 Yes Sir, they will be ready

Also: Have a heart
Also: Don’t touch my body

Invite me to be your friend, I promise I can be fun still
Even if I’m not pregnant and happy like you
Even if I’m not in power like you
I’m always here
On my couch
Ready to talk
Waiting for the phone to ring –
I’ll check the caller ID –
But if it’s you,
I promise I’ll pick up.

Elisabeth Horan is a poet mother student lover of kind people and animals, homesteading in Vermont with her tolerant partner and two young sons. She hopes the earth can withstand us and that humans may learn to be more kind to each other and to Mother Nature. She has recently been featured in Quail Bell Magazine and Dying Dahlia Review. She has work forthcoming at The Occulum, Alexander & Brook and at Switchgrass Review. Elisabeth is a 2018 MFA candidate at Lindenwood University and teaches at River Valley Community College in New Hampshire. Follow her @ehoranpoet.

Photo credit: Sarah Laval via a Creative Commons license.

A Drill Song from the Turkish Resistance

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Translation by Süleyman Soydemir and the Turkish Youth

From an anonymous variant of a military drill song, “Gündoğdu Marşı,” or “The Sunrise Anthem,” was a symbol of the anti-fascist Turkish resistance in the 1960s and 70s.

Today, it serves as a symbol of hope in the face of an increasingly authoritarian regime.

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Gündoğdu Marşı

Gün doğdu, hep uyandık
Siperlere dayandık
Bağımsızlık uğruna da
Al kanlara boyandık

Yolumuz devrim yolu
Gelin kardaşlar gelin
Yurdumuz da faşist dolmuş
Vurun kardaşlar vurun

Yurdumuz da faşist dolmuş
Vurun kardaşlar vurun!

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The Sunrise Anthem

At Sunrise, we all wake up
Trenches bracing our shoulders
For our freedom we stand against
Blood-red shrapnel showers

Our path leads to revolution
March on brothers and sisters
Against this fascist infestation
Strike on brothers and sisters

Against this fascist infestation
Strike on brothers and sisters!

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Listen to the sung form here, since, as Mr. Soydemir wrote, “Let’s face it, poetry is almost always more inspiring when sung aloud.”

Süleyman Soydemir is a believer in the supposedly antiquated chants of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity and a student of Anatolian Folk Traditions and Culture. His current—and perhaps ultimate—purpose in life is to tell the stories of resistance against tyrants, thieves and internet trolls.

Notes on the translation from Süleyman Soydemir:

The translated version is about 1.5 times the length of the original in terms of word count. However, this is largely irrelevant, since Turkish poetry uses syllables rather than words in determining length, and the translation has almost the same metric value as the original. Another reason for the length discrepancy is because of Turkish phonetics, which allows for almost all words to be split wherever you want and for most vowel lengths to be changed as needed. As I wanted to keep the translation more or less sing-able, words such as “trenches” have to be placed strategically. While these might be important considerations to make in metric and/or folk poetry, translators of free-meter poetry tend to value the emotional effectiveness of the end product and its ability to carry over the intended meaning.

I have translated some verses rather liberally, especially concerning the “shrapnel showers” and “fascist infestation.” This is because most of the verbs and some of the nouns used in the original do not carry the same power and colloquial meaning they have in Turkish, prompting me to strengthen the translation using different methods. It is the translator’s job to strike a balance between the two ends and decide on where to draw the lines. Finally, as the word “sibling” is seldom used colloquially in English, the Turkish equivalent, “kardaş,” was translated as “brothers and sisters.”

Photo credit: Marco Verch via a Creative Commons license.

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Hitler Speaks

Charlottesville, Virginia, August 12, 2017

By Kathi Wolfe

You said
I was a has-been —
my day was done.
You wish!
I’ve been undercover,
before your unseeing
eyes.

I shaved my
moustache, changed
my accent, Tweeted — ordered
lattes at Starbucks. In khakis
and polo shirts, I was the boy
next door. My torches
were kept in the closet,
I only drew swastikas in the dark.

Now I can stop living
a double life. I’ll goose step
in the Easter Parade. Swastikas
will be the new Boy Scout badges —
I’ll model my torch on the next Vogue cover.
Welcome to my comeback tour!

Kathi Wolfe is a poet and writer. Her most recent collection, The Uppity Blind Girl Poems, was published in 2015 by BrickHouse Books and won the 2014 Stonewall Chapbook Competition. She is a contributor to the anthologies QDA: A Queer Disability Anthology and Beauty Is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability. Wolfe was a 2008 Lambda Literary Foundation Emerging Writer Fellow. She is a contributor to The Washington Blade, the acclaimed LGBTQ paper.

Photo credit: Dmitry Dzhus via a Creative Commons license.

A Prayer

By Jackleen Holton Hookway

This world is just a little place, just the red in the sky, before the sun rises, so let us keep fast hold of hands, that when the birds begin, none of us be missing. –Emily Dickinson

A sapling shakes, and a gust
of new red-crested finches are launched
into a sky already thick with song. Since sun-up,
the ruby-throated hummingbirds
at the neighbor’s feeder have been at it;
the thrum of their wings, their tiny
voices rapt in happy bird-gossip.

Yes, the glaciers are melting, irreversibly now.
And the other day, my friend, walking
in his neighborhood of rainbow flags
and prayer flags, saw three swastikas blackly
shadowing the wall of the community theatre.
But the birds don’t know any of this—or if they do,
they’ve known it all along.

So let us now keep a vigilant eye
on the horizon, always seeking out the red
in the sky, its teacup of sun rising above
the morning fog. Let us look in on our neighbor
from time to time. And let us be kind to each other,
kinder now than we have ever been.
Amen.

Jackleen Holton Hookway’s poems have appeared in American Literary Review, Bellingham Review, Mobius: The Journal of Social Change, North American Review, Poet Lore, Rattle, Rise Up Review, and are forthcoming in the anthology Not My President (Thoughtcrime Press).

Photo credit: Kate Ter Haar via a Creative Commons license.

For Kepler 138b (the beautiful)

By mica woods

if you took a telescope to the sky
200 lightyears away

happened to point it down on
this country, would you see the slaughter

and the selling by those men
we carry memories of in our pockets

or would you not notice the labor
in the fields as different from

the digging crews of the Eerie Canal
can you measure the mass

of suffering from your red dwarf
by detecting the wobble

in Mars as we pass nearby
or the light we block from the sun

could you see what freedom
has meant in its scabbed-over cloth

how we could set a scale and weigh
a heart / or body / i’m sorry

you had to see us on our birthday
with sweat and lashes and mounds

of scars, burning villages / massacres
200 years ago but if you could

see us now—no cover-up no / blush
would you say we look

like an old lover
and we haven’t aged a day

mica woods used to live with a family of raccoons in Missouri, but currently they edit the Columbia Poetry Review and teach at Columbia College Chicago as an MFA candidate. In 2015, they received the Merrill Moore Prize for Poetry from Vanderbilt University. Other recent poems can be found in Pretty Owl Poetry, The New Territory, Hollow Literary Journal, and Heavy Feather Review.

Image credit: Danielle Futselaar via a Creative Commons license.