Tag: Poetry

Prayer

By I.E. Sommsin

God, will you forgive the sins of our times,
this sad era, its soft habits of thought
and the glib assumptions easily taught
that breed the lying slogans worse than crimes?
We cannot help how the words work to cloud
and clog and flood the forums of the mind.
They build the thick high walls that keep us blind
and kill the calm silence with all that’s loud.
Myth, wild tales, and the clever fools come cheap,
and the boldly stupid prompt great cheering,
while the magical, repeated, jeering
accusation makes the shallow look deep.
You in the future will know what I feel
when your nation’s caught on history’s wheel.

 

I.E. Sommsin, a writer and artist from Kentucky, lives in San Francisco and has a fondness for sonnets.

Photo credit: donaldjtrump.com

Upon Recognizing Yesterday’s ‘Well-Meaning’ Poem Was Still as Paternalistic as Ever

By D. R. James

—1/22/17

Outside, still January, but 40 not 15,
gauzy, black-and-white woods
from The Wolf Man. Inside,
a gauzy-gray (un?)consciousness
from This White Man, half-reclined
in buttery, dove-gray leather. It’s envisioning
millions of protesting women, now back
perhaps in their individual towns,
their power proclaimed not awakened,
or still making their way back
from D.C., G.R., L.A., NYC,
Denver, Chicago, Baltimore,
Honolulu, Madison, Wichita,
Reno, Boston, Memphis, Atlanta,
Albuquerque, Gulfport, Asbury Park,
Laramie, Ashville, Orlando, Seattle,
Old Saybrook, Corpus Christie, Erie, Roanoke,
Eugene, New Delhi, Vienna, Minsk,
La Paz, Prague, Strasbourg, Botswana,
EX Village des Jeux Ankorondrano,
Dublin, Athens, San Jose, Sofia,
Copenhagen, Tel Aviv, Geneva, Liverpool,
Cape Town, Moscow, Yellow Knife, Beirut,
Buenos Aires, Belgrade, Bangkok, Boise …
Will it never, ever learn?

 

D. R. James is the author of the poetry collection Since Everything Is All I’ve Got (March Street Press) and five chapbooks, including most recently Why War and Split-Level (both from Finishing Line Press). Poems have appeared in various journals, such as Caring Magazine, Coe Review, Diner, Dunes Review, Friends of William Stafford Newsletter, HEArt Online, Hotel Amerika, North Dakota Quarterly, Passager, Rattle, The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, and Sycamore Review, and anthologies, including Ritual to Read Together: Poems in Conversation with William Stafford (Woodley) and Poetry in Michigan / Michigan in Poetry (New Issues). James lives in Saugatuck, Michigan, and has been teaching writing, literature, and peace-making at Hope College for 32 years. Read about D. R. James here.

Photo credit: Daniel Oines via a Creative Commons license.

İblis döl salıbdı, Şeytan bələkdə / The devil gave birth, and now Satan is in diapers

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By Mirza Sakit

İblis döl salıbdı, Şeytan bələkdə,
Şərlənən məmləkət yıxılmaqdadı
Altun qolbağılar əyri biləkdə,
Düz bilək qandalda sıxılmaqdadı

Abır da gözləyib çəkdin pərdəni,
Halal buğda əkdin, indi ver dəni
Oğrunun əliylə “Şöhrət” ordeni,
Namərd yaxasına taxılmaqdadı

Dədəsin gizlədən buzda xəlvəti,
Sən də gözləyirsən ondan mürvəti
Tanrının verdiyi Xalqın sərvəti,
Sırtılmış üzlərə yaxılmaqdadı

Mirzə söylədikcə dürüst kəlməsin,
Deyirlər qürbətdən durub gəlməsin
Həqiqət danışan, haqq deyən kəsin,
Başına güllələr çaxılmaqdadı…

Mirza Sakit is an Azerbaijani poet, writer, journalist and satirist. While working for the newspaper Azadliq, he was arrested for his anti-government writing and imprisoned for three years in Azerbaijan. His arrest caused an uproar in the international writers community and among numerous human rights organizations, including PEN America. He was granted asylum by Belgium, and now lives and writes there. He’s the author of four books, critical of the Azerbaijani authoritarian regime.

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English translation by Murad Jalilov and Kevin Rabas

The devil gave birth to Satan, a sign
that this slandered country is about to fall.
Golden bracelets hang from crooked wrists,
and metal handcuffs tighten around righteous wrists.

You closed the curtains to preserve your dignity.
You planted the seeds, and now let us harvest the grain.
But, with the hands of a thief, you hang the medal of “honor”
on the chest of the unkind.

You hide your father in ice, keep him frozen,
wishing his immortality,
while the God-given wealth of our nation
stains bent faces.

Whenever I speak up honestly,
I am told to stay in exile.
Anyone in their right mind
is shot in the head.

Murad Jalilov has recently graduated with BAs in English and Political Science at Emporia State University and is a graduate student in the MA program in Russian and Eastern European Studies at University of Oregon. He has poems published in Quivira and is active in his literary community. He is fluent is Russian, Azerbaijani, Turkish, and English.

Kevin Rabas, Poet Laureate of Kansas (2017-2019), teaches at Emporia State University, where he leads the poetry and playwriting tracks. He has seven books, including Lisa’s Flying Electric Piano, a Kansas Notable Book and Nelson Poetry Book Award winner.

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Photo credit: Segment of the sculpture “Shadows of the Wanderer” by Brazilian artist Ana Maria Pacheco.

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Stand Up

By Linda Parsons

  

Sit down, sit down, sit down, sit down,
sit down, you’re rockin’ the boat.

                               —Frank Loesser, Guys and Dolls

 

                               Lo these many years,
I the peacemaker, the walker on eggshells,
the biter of lips, the please pleaser, the clay
not the molder, the stream not the bank,
the moss not the rock, the stern not the bow,
queen of if only I’d said, if only I’d done.
Lo I say unto you, I’m done with sit down,
sit down, done with the broom and its dust,
old love and its rust, the future walking right
out the door. Hear me, I’m here with a voice
from the gloom, the moon-filled room, rise
of wing to beat the band, however long
I must stand is how long I’ll rock,
rock, rock the boat.

                               Grab this, strike this,
be peace in the deafest of ears, be this,
if you can bear the whole of me holding
up half the sky’s the limit, be aware,
O beware the end is near, the end of silence
of reticence of swallowing it down, choking
on what can’t be told in mixed company.
I’ll be clearing my throat, unbending
my knee, strapping my heart to my sleeve.
The one speaking aloud who sings without
pause, the unturned cheek, the unshut eye,
who digs her heels in this wide-awake
moment and lets the mother tongue fly.

 

Linda Parsons is a poet, playwright, and an editor at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. She is the reviews editor for Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel and served as poetry editor of Now & Then magazine for many years. Her work has appeared in such journals as The Georgia Review, One, Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, Southern Poetry Review, Shenandoah, in Ted Kooser’s column American Life in Poetry, and in numerous anthologies. This Shaky Earth is her fourth poetry collection (Texas Review Press). Parsons’s adaptation, Macbeth Is the New Black, co-written with Jayne Morgan, was produced at Maryville College and Western Carolina University, and her play Under the Esso Moon was read as part of the 2016 Tennessee Stage Company’s New Play Festival and received a staged reading in spring 2017.

Photo credit: Shivenis via a Creative Commons license.

 

lavender:

By Lily Moody

Pink or blue

When our daughters are taught to hold their tongues and our sons are taught to hold their tears, when all we want to do is scream and sob.

Pink or blue

When dolls and toy trucks, bows and baseball gloves are used as barriers to separate us,
when femininity and masculinity are shamed from crossing paths.

Pink or blue

When the blood pumps the same through all bodies and these bones cage a fire so much brighter than they will ever begin to understand.

When he paints his lips dark red and finally feels beautiful, when she lets the hair on her body grow into a forest.

 

Lily Moody is a former yet-to-be-published writing student and an activist, located in Southern New Hampshire and hoping to make a difference through poetry and prose.

Photo credit: Homo Erectus via a Creative Commons license.

Human fatigue

By Eduardo Escalante

1. close into symbols

The city looked full
artery of Santiago choked with cars
a tatted man
was standing in front of a tree
Affirmed to a symbol
in this street
there was no crosswalk
his body jumped
It seemed 3d drawing
We can leave we can look
the tattoo is the sign because he jumps

2. the boy with the gun

The morning opened obscure
The sun had eye closed
I walked for different streets
An old lady looked at me from her window
When the church
men with revolvers assaulting a car
One looked at my head
he was fourteen years old
And with a bullet touched my shoes
While a bus passed

3. winter city

Poor looks poor
Shoes too big
He did have a hat
He lacked affection in his arm
He scratched his head again and again
The city is always indulgent

4. being in the city

it is like swimming in the swamp
it does not walk away
The pain is there
suffering seems a fate
tighter tighter tighter
against an endless swirl of human wind.
the whole world comes to spectacle,
arrive all private woe and
we see the public farce.
Samples of oligarchy even if they are plastic
too much people fill their hearts and lungs with ashes
It is difficult to be a part
of a policy signed and sealed.

 

Eduardo Escalante is an author, writer, researcher, living in Valparaíso, Chile. He writes about happiness, love, social justice, and current events. Eduardo’s work appears in several Spanish publications and reviews, including signum Nous, Ariadna, Nagari, Espacio_Luke, and Lakuma Pusaki, and in Spillwords Press.

Photo credit: Javier Vieras via a Creative Commons license.

Standing Rock, 2016

By Marydale Stewart

I sent my heart, that figurative muscle,
that metaphor, that emblem,
to go in my stead to Standing Rock

where my feet have never known the steady earth,
that certain sky, the remembered places the wind has been,
where I’ve never known another living being as my own,
where the people came together
building, feeding, singing, hoping,
where grief and hope called them all together,
where they’re showing a nation how to be a nation.

I’ve been to other places where the land I stood on
spoke to me with a blackbird’s call, a silvered silent creek,
where I sheltered in the humming wind for days, nights,
and the long singing years.

Helpless I am in love and grief,
for the earth is my home, wherever I am.

 

Marydale Stewart is a retired English teacher and librarian. She received her Ph.D. at Northern Illinois University and taught at NIU and community colleges. She has a chapbook, Inheritance (Puddin’head Press, Chicago, 2008), and two poetry collections, Let the Thunder In (Boxing Day Books, Princeton, IL, 2014) and The Walking Man, forthcoming from Kelsay Books, Hemet, CA, October 2017. A novel, The Wanderers, is forthcoming from Black Rose Writing, Castroville, TX, also in October 2017. She has poems in a number of literary magazines.

“Standing Rock” was published in the 2017 “Refugees and the Displaced” edition of DoveTales, Writing for Peace, Ft. Collins, CO.

Photo credit: Cannupa Hanska Luger’s Mirror Shield Project at the Oceti Sakowin Camp near Standing Rock, ND, 2016

Clarion Reminder

By Laura Grace Weldon

The powerful provoke the powerless
to push against one another.
Their power grows by keeping us
in all kinds of prisons.

Yet we are not powerless.

Remember the black bear
roaming Clarion County, Pennsylvania,
its head trapped a month or more
in a metal-ringed pail.

Remember those who chased it for hours,
grabbed it in a perilous embrace,
carefully sawed loose those tight bonds.
Imagine what they felt as the bear
ran free into the woods.
Imagine, too, the bear.

 

Laura Grace Weldon is the author of a poetry collection, Tending, and a handbook of alternative education, Free Range Learning. She has a collection of essays due out soon. Laura has written poetry with nursing home residents, used poetry to teach conflict resolution, and painted poems on beehives, although her work appears in more conventional places, such as J Journal, Penman Review, Literary Mama, Christian Science Monitor, Mom Egg Review, Dressing Room Poetry Journal, Shot Glass Journal, and others. Connect with her on Facebook, Twitter or at her site, lauragraceweldon.com.

Photo credit: Tiffany Terry via a Creative Commons license.

White Privilege

By Keith Welch

 

the U.S. Caucasian has
a marvelous power

invisible, noticed
only by its absence

subtle in action:

the lack of a shadow
following you through a 7-11

or utterly, terribly clear:

the lack of 19 bullet holes
piercing your body

on the news, you may notice
your senior photo
instead of a mug shot

in the city, the absence
of a cop’s hand
in your pockets

in your car, a warning
instead of dying
in a jail cell

there are those who will deny
the power’s very existence

it shouts its presence
to those outside its shield

 

Keith Welch lives in Bloomington, Indiana. He has had work published in Louisville’s Leo magazine, and online at Spilling Cocoa Over Martin Amis. Follow him on Twitter: @outraged_poet.

Photo credit: Image of Ti-Rock Moore‘s sculpture “Just Sayin” by Bart Everson via a Creative Commons license.

Hail and Farewell to Editors of Poetry

Writers Resist is delighted to welcome our new poetry editor, Ruth Nolan, MFA, University of California Riverside. Already a contributing writer, Ruth brings to the journal a deep understanding of the power of the written word.

Ruth said of poetry’s role in the resistance, “Poetry is at heart a political entity, one that is both personal and public. Poetry is the most specific and enduring heart-soul language. It crosses and connects cultures seamlessly, and compels us to not only look at—and oppose—what’s around us in difficult and oppressive times, but to act in the name of truth and justice to evoke living models for the continued sustainability of humanity.”

While we welcome Ruth, we’re sad to say farewell to Rae Rose, our founding poetry editor, but she is moving on to fabulous things. She’s now the editor of Kids! San Diego Poetry Annual, a new publication and poetry program from the San Diego Entertainment + Arts Guild. Rae is excited to pass the poetic torch to Ruth, whom she describes as “Amazing!” and for good reason.

Ruth 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. Connect with Ruth via Twitter @ruthnolan.

Best of all, Ruth comes bearing gifts—a poem for our readers. …

Dream Act

By Ruth Nolan

She rinses burnt skin away from green chilis,
her hands stinging from the burn of spicy seeds,
her hands singed from working in the desert sun
so close to where children cry for their parents.

She strips skin from hearts, muscle from stem,
and looks to the sky. Storm clouds, rising high
over Mexico. She slips families of chilis into
ziplock bags, packs them tight as contraband.

Tonight, mute dreams will ache skyward like
towering date palms, fruit sacs tightly bound.
Tonight, fat clouds the shape of sperm whales
will swim across the line with promises of rain.

 

Photo credit: “Strange Heat” by Georgie Dee via a Creative Commons license.

Oral History of the New Colossus

By Lea Grover

I come from a people of wandering,
of desert paths swept clean of footprints by thousand year gusts of wind,
of vanishing,
of villages abandoned as not only my great-grandmothers but I
carried what mattered across oceans and borders
and the ticking of latitude and longitude beneath tired feet,
soles hardened by lifetimes searching for security in silences.
Safety made only by pillars of hands reaching to pull each other up,
reaching for those left behind.
A Babel towering over each town
teetering, fear and suspicion pulling apart,
toppling,
leaving my people to wander,
wondering if our hands faltered
and what we might have lost.

I come from a people of wandering.
my ancestors’ feet carried traces of soil to Israel from Shushan by way of Palestine,
fleeing Portuguese diaspora and Gestapo,
to know always they tracked the same soil,
black against brown skin faded pale
from Persia to Prussia to Poland and Russia
to Bergen-Belsen
to oblivion.
I come from a people of otherness,
of isolation and exile and inquisition,
a people who carried, clutched to their chests,
hope and compassion,
the need to give, and to find, and to share.
I come from a line of translators and teachers,
scientists and novelists
physicists and activists,
magicians, philosophers, insurance sellers,
holy men and fortunetellers,
and they melded into my bones and my muscles the memories
of the things they carried and the eternal instructions—
“Never forget.”
They carried this call to a land built by slaves,
who picked cotton instead of building pyramids or Volkswagons,
awareness of what is lost when a people are torn from home and tongue,
Kunta Kinte refusing renaming reminded us of
identity replaced by tattoo.

I come from a people of kippot and mitpachat,
forbidden to own land or hold office
but permitted to touch money believed only slightly less filthy than they.
A people who took lemons grown from oppression and made bitter lemonade,
who thrived despite obstruction and accusation and assault.
Kippot and mitpachat could have been kefiyah and hijab,
words that are foreign
for clothing that is foreign
for people who are foreign
with religions that are foreign
when foreign means feared.
Banking could have been
picking tomatoes for pennies a pint,
speaking languages that are foreign
in customs that are foreign
with faces that are foreign
when foreign means abhorred
and hatred is directed toward any people who once explored after exile
and came in hordes to a beacon of welcome proclaiming,
“Give me your tired and your poor,”
any people of wandering.

I come from a people of wandering,
but I look into the shadows of their past and I see what I have,
a history,
my own Tower of Babel built of spaces between silences,
of the hands of immigrants and outsiders.
I see the path behind of violence and vengeance
condemning my descendants to the same fate of remembrance.
When I press into my daughters’ bones and muscles the memories of their mother’s people,
when I scar them with the words, “Never again,”
I speak not only for my grandmothers and their grandmothers and their grandmothers
but I,
for all our children,
with the same dirt on the soles of their feet
of deserts crossed and mountains scaled.
Skin brown or black or pale,
tempest tossed, torn and assailed,
souls yearning to breathe free,
however foreign or familiar,
still mishpachah,
still family.
Still we reach in the security of silence to pull each other up,
reaching for those left behind.
If only to lose no more.
Beside any golden door we must lift our lamps,
we wanderers of generations,
to mourn together in our teetering, tottering towers.
Drink the bitter lemonade of our ancestors.
We carried only what mattered,
the same dirt on our feet,
wandering the same path back and back and back again,
wondering if this time it has led us home.

 

Lea Grover is a writer and speaker in Chicago. She began studying prose when she was admitted to college at fourteen years of age, five years after her first poetry publication. Her writing can be found in many anthologies, and she contributes to Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire, and Bustle, among other magazines online and in print. Lea speaks about sex positivity parenting and on behalf of the RAINN Speakers Bureau. Her current projects include a memoir about the similarities between battling brain cancer and mental illness, and a series of children’s books.

Photo credit: Surian Soosay via a Creative Commons license.

On a Theme by Leonard Cohen

By Mark J. Mitchell

 

I’m guided by the beauty of our weapons.

            —”First We Take Manhattan”

I’m battered by the blindness of our weapons.
Boys stare at screens and tickle switches.

Death drops from the sky
onto archaic altars.

Isaac screams. Ishmael burns.
Rachel weeps for her children.

From the empty office, ritual words:
We sincerely regret collateral damage.

Mark J. Mitchell’s latest novel, The Magic War just appeared from Loose Leaves Publishing. He studied writing at UC Santa Cruz under Raymond Carver and George Hitchcock. His work has appeared in the several anthologies and hundreds of periodicals. Three of his chapbooks—Three Visitors, Lent, 1999 and Artifacts and Relics—and the novel, Knight Prisoner are available through Amazon and Barnes & Noble. He lives with his wife, the activist Joan Juster, and makes a living pointing out pretty things in San Francisco.

Photo credit: Doug Bowman via a Creative Commons license.

Judgment

By Dianne Olsen

Her name is the color of bright yellow sunflowers,
the scent of dusky sage.
Her intense black hair
absorbs the sun.
She stands close, her hand clutching mine,
Flora, my mother, my friend,
my accompaniment to life.
I am a bubble of laughter
from her lips
a note of joy tossed in the air one early morning.
I am a fish swimming
in her holy sea,
a bead on a string that has
no end.
She keeps one chamber in her heart
open just for me.

Today we stand on the Avenida de Colores,
across from the immigration courthouse.
We have walked a long way in the New Mexico sun.
We wait while our breathing settles.
Inside the court, a judge will decide whether we go or stay.
He will say what the law means,
but he cannot see
inside our hearts, our bones.
The judge has not heard our songs.

A thousand years ago,
mothers like mine knew this land.
The cactus flowers remember
our grandmothers.
The sand crystals
and the red rocks
keep our brothers’ secrets.

Our fathers spoke in a music that makes
our bones strong,
songs unknown on Highway 65.
Today we may be forbidden to
call this desert home.

In the courthouse,
the immigration judge will ask us
why we deserve to live here.

I hold tight to my mother’s hand.
She and I wear the sun-stained faces of
this desert.
Our songs, our names,
the dry gardens we created,
our brothers, fathers,
the very scent of the red stones:
These things we will tell him.
These things make this our home.

 

Dianne Olsen is a garden consultant and a freelance writer and poet living in the Berkshires of Massachusetts. She wrote “The Valley Gardener” column for the Poughkeepsie Journal for almost four years in the early 2000s. She recently retired from a 15-year career as environment and horticulture educator with Cornell Cooperative Extension in Putnam County, NY.

Photo credit: Scrubhiker via a Creative Commons license.

Land of the Free

By Sahar Fathi

 

You say
we are all equal
Give us your tired
your poor
your huddled freaking masses!
But not if
they are Muslim
brown
persecuted
by governments (we installed)
drug wars (we created)
I say
give them to me
I will pull the stars from the sky
to light their way
o’er the land of the free
and whisper to them
of the America we can be

 

Sahar Fathi is the Division Director for Leadership Development at the Department of Neighborhoods in the City of Seattle. Sahar graduated from the University of Washington Law School and is a member of the New York bar. She also earned a Masters in International Studies from the University of Washington, and graduated cum laude from the University of Southern California with a dual Bachelor of Arts in French and International Relations. Additionally, Sahar attended the Sorbonne Université in Paris, France from 2003-2004 and received a diploma in International and European Law from the Université Jean-Moulin in Lyon, France in 2008. Sahar has worked on immigrant and refugee issues for over 10 years, both internationally and nationally. She has served as adjunct faculty at both Seattle University and the University of Washington School of Law. Sahar has been published in the Seattle Journal for Social Justice, the Seattle Journal of Environmental Law, and the Gonzaga Law Review. Following President Trump’s Executive Orders banning travel from majority Muslim countries, Sahar volunteered at SeaTac airport to support impacted travelers. In her spare time, she enjoys exploring resistance through Iranian cooking. You can follow her on Instagram at @sfathis.

Photo credit: “America’s Most Famous Immigrant” by Manhhai via a Creative Commons license.

No rules to follow, no laws to break—we woke!

By Zigi Lowenberg

 

’scuse me
’scuse me, don’t know the rules here
but I butt in
across the room, I know
we were once from the same tribe
ancient threads pulling me towards you
float along the oceans that
fool the eye with their expanse

we are salt
we are sand
we are water

no rules to follow, no laws to break
for we have seen this before
raids and pogroms, a border a Wall
my refugee heart
treads across steppes bearing petrified trunks
rails clanging against Kindertransport of another kind,
cold-sweat defying dreams
throwing ICE on the rocks—

no rules to follow, no laws to break
for now we woke and won’t let go, we are the embrace
and to you, your generations I’m tethered
somos unidos
ale eyn mentshn

we are salt
we are sand
we are water,
we are one.

 

Zigi Lowenberg, performance poet and co-leader of the jazzpoetry ensemble UpSurge!, has appeared at music festivals, rallies, clubs, bookstores and universities from NYC to New Orleans to San Francisco. Zigi’s acting credits include The Lysistrata Project, the Stein-Toklas Project, and John Brown’s Truth. Zigi is a member of the National Writers Union and Radical Poets Collective. Her poetry has appeared in the poetry journal rabbit and rose. Her essay, “Support the Edge!” will be published in a book Creative Lives (spring 2017). Zigi and her husband, Raymond Nat Turner, are executive producers on UpSurge!’s two independent CD recordings, which have garnered critical acclaim. They live in Harlem and Oakland.

Also by Zigi Lowenberg: “Protest Poem in Two Acts.”

Photo credit: Lefteris Heretakis via a Creative Commons license.

A Roof Over Their Heads

By Brian Dunlap

 

                        I

Jorge has reached Mar Vista Park.
The bells attached to his
icebox on wheels announce
the popsicles and ice cream sandwiches,
enticing on a warm
Los Angeles summer day.

Older siblings and parents
chase children
whose giggles and squeals
permeate the jungle gym. Footprints
upon footprints imprinted in the sand.
Where Spanish mingles with
English and Mandarin. Sprinkled
with Arabic and Hindi.

Here, Jorge wanders, slight hunch
to his gate, silent. He only pauses
to state prices in broken English.
Smiles. Only talks to the parents
who speak his native tongue.
Who speak
Spanish.

                        II

Jorge sells ice cream for a simple
smile on a child’s face.
He does it to keep worry
and hunger from his sons’ eyes. For his sons
to stay children
a while longer.

As Jorge removes his Stetson
and wipes sweat from his brow
he thinks about tomorrow’s soccer match
between Mexico and Guatemala.
It’s at noon when children start to rush
and dollars finally accumulate in his palm.
But when a young boy runs up
with a soccer ball tucked beneath his arm,
Jorge sees his sons.
Sees them kick the ball
past the goalie’s
diving frame.

Standing beside his icebox
as his sons’ rec league game unfolds.

                        III

Tomorrow, if Jorge leaves early and departs
when the game ends
he can watch it with his sons
and still provide a place
where they can rest their eyes,
drift off
till light presents another morning.

 

Brian Dunlap is a native Angeleño who continues to live in Los Ángeles. He is passionate about capturing the L.A. stories that are hidden in plain sight. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Fresno State and a BA in Creative Writing from UC Riverside, both in fiction. His work has appeared in Angel City Review, CCM-Entropy, Muse, California Quarterly, Statement Magazine and Dryland. He runs the blog site www.losangelesliterature.wordpress.com, a resource to explore L.A.’s vast literary culture.

Photo credit: Matthew Rutledge via a Creative Commons license.

Market Value

By Yun Wei

Monday markets egg-dropped
in the summer camp race,
and somewhere a global circuit grid
slowed, blinked, shorted.
Where did the treasure go?
I know I could never read this map.

Now at my desk on a Monday night,
drinking from a sweating glass,
I think of summer camps, of gathering scrapes
and grass on knees, of my bike crumbling
on hills when I misplaced gravity,
of how as I grew longer,
the distances became dizzier,
the way the ground shrank from
the constant state of forward,
my body in straight lines
walking through a city without maps,
because falling means crumbling
means dismantling, look
how I’ve learned to mark
every step with vertigo.
No one tells you then
that there’s no such thing as going back.

Yes the Monday markets fell
into a Chinese puddle
of oil, of iron, of copper,
but the only markets I knew
were those of cabbage leaves
crushed under sole,
and sidewalk glue from fish guts
even after they rinsed the street
and closed the stands,
after the woman selling salt-boiled peanuts
shook her barefoot daughter awake
to walk home and I walk home
by my father’s hand:
the only map I knew to read.

 

Yun Wei received her MFA in Poetry from Brooklyn College and a Bachelor’s in International Relations from Georgetown University. Her writing awards include the Geneva Literary Prizes for Fiction and Poetry and the Himan Brown Poetry Fellowship. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in decomP Magazine, Roanoke Review, Apt Magazine, Word Riot, The Brooklyn Review and other journals. For the last few years, she had been working on global health in Switzerland, where she consistently failed at mountain sports. Visit her website at The Pomegranate Way.

Also by Yun Wei: “We the People Who March.”

Photo credit: Gianni Dominici via a Creative Commons license.

Waste, Land

By Elizabeth Carmichael

Now is the time we find out what we’re made of.
We have felt oil in the air for months but
imagined once the weather turned
we could wash it out—

and so we learn what stains.
Now locked out of the lab we must experiment
on our own conclusions: follow orders,
pull the levers, look away

(or do we jump ourselves?).
What will we become, with no respite
our hearts may turn to Sisyphus,
breaking every day,

only to be repaired again with the same twine.
Now is the time we learn if we face into the wind
or circle around and make our backs
curve into a shell and stay inside.

Stand tall, or disrupt the arrow’s trajectory?

 

Elizabeth Carmichael refutes biography as a form of identification. She is well-educated, well-read and well-travelled for an American. She was published, not recently, in The Cranbrook Review

“Heart and Arrow” by Scott Gressitt.

Levels of Knowing and Existence

By Martin H. Levinson

Truth is a liar Trump says,
a smokescreen invented by gay,
black environmentalists who
sneak spics across the border
when the border patrol has its
back turned because they are
busy at work keeping Muslims
out of the country and pledging
allegiance to the flag of the
Divided States of America, and
to the Republics for which it stands,
two nations under Smog, inexplicable,
with liberty and justice for misogynists,
racists and science-deniers who want
to make America great again like it was
before Obamacare, the EPA and the
North’s conquest of the South in
the War Between the States.

 

 

Martin H. Levinson is a member of the Authors Guild, National Book Critics Circle, PEN, and the book review editor for ETC: A Review of General Semantics. He has published nine books and numerous articles and poems in various publications. He holds a PhD from NYU and lives in Forest Hills, New York.

Image credit: U.S. Library of Congress.

Love Letter to Chicago

By Dein Sofley

 

Cook County Citizens, I’m writing this letter to you on behalf of my friend Dein. She loves you and wants you to love her.

I’ve never been to Chicago, but I’ve heard that it’s windy: a working class city with a heart of gold. Home to Gwendolyn Brooks, Studs Terkel, Muddy Waters, Kanye West, Richard Wright, Chief Keef, Li-Young Lee, Common, Chance the Rapper, Haki Madhubuti and America’s forty-fourth president.

Dein is sorry she left you. Heartbroken. Confused. It took her 2,104 miles—through winking lights and gasoline, by time’s appetite and dismembered memories—to figure out that it wasn’t you she was afraid of; it was her feelings. Lost to be found, she came back to you on Valentine’s Day, her wayward tongue thirsty for the taste of your wounds and the words she has yet to earn. The Centennial Fountain marks the shape of returns.

Her body needs you. The arresting rush of your winds, the roar of your trains, the screams of your ambulances, the murmurs of your lake, the slap of your gun shots, the impatient footfalls, the spasms of car horns, the scent of cumin and skulking lilacs find the humming in her ribs. She’ll abandon sleep to breathe you in. In your noise, a love-in-answer. But how will you hear her?

Her: the class clown, the orphan, the shape shifter, always moving, famished for meaning, looking for ways to be real. A foundling in your sanctuary, she wants to serve your storied, buttressed, scavenged, policed city. Soothe her unrequited ache for home, Chicago, please; put her back together again. You people: your misfit blocks of dark skinned cousins, bushy Slavic uncles, lining waving yentas, the vendors selling StreetWise, the paleta man at 63rd Street Beach, the kids rolling across the green at Foster, the Army of Moms patrolling Englewood, the polar bears who jump in the lake midwinter, daring death for vigor.

You lent her: Gina Frangello, Megan Steilstra, Kevin Coval, and Joe Meno.

She lent you: her daughter.

Your jazz scabbed streets of tribes: Mexican, Puerto Rican, Polish, Vietnamese, Palestinian, Indian, Pakistani, Swedish, Ukrainian, Israeli, that pull her out at night like an addict unable to name what she seeks through thrumming engines that collide with the babel of languages. Behind the sounds is another sound. And another.

Your long shouts of avenues: candy-colored storefronts, Beijing ducks roasting in windows, nail salons, tattoo parlors, dive bars, bathhouses, used goods, gold coasts, magnificent miles, dry cleaners and good burritos. All no-bullshit propositions that allow her to keep the criminal feeling of sovereignty.

The tavern sign says: “$2 Shot $4 Pints.” The grammar might be wrong, but she gets the message. This joint’s here for a shot and a beer and a six-pack to go because like her, you keep moving.

And you give: public parks, social policy, scholarships, cultural institutions.

And you take: seven hundred and forty-seven homicides last year.

If only she were bulletproof. When fear left and she said “I’ll make my home here.” She adopted a slew of stray cats, gathered her band of banshees, and stayed. She’ll fight for your honor. She’ll scrape away the narrative outliers made to her extinction. No sissies admitted.

Because in your winter mornings when she sees one neighbor shoveling another’s car out of the snow or a woman in hijab helping an old Russian man navigate the slippery sidewalk in route to the bus stop, mornings when the goodness of human beings shine, she feels herself triumphing.

 

Dein Sofley teaches Syrian refugees English at Albany Park Community Center. She earned her BA from Columbia College Chicago and is currently pursuing her MFA in fiction from UC Riverside’s low-residency program, where she also serves as nonfiction editor for The Coachella Review.

Photo credit: “Chicago Through a Cloud” by Roman Boed via a Creative Commons license.