November Ninth

By Mariana Llanos

November ninth, two thousand sixteen—
deception slowly, painfully sinking in.
I open my white French blinds; I look around
the cul-de-sac, the well-kept middle class
homes bounding mine.
I imagine neighbors still sleeping in,
not caring, not concerned what would be next
for some of us.
I wonder if all those times we spoke—
me, in my dark skin and thick accent,
them, in their whiter than pearls whiteness—
they thought this is where I belonged
or if they saw me as a foreigner,
a stranger,
a taker.
“Paranoid, paranoid,” I tell myself.
No. I refuse to think the worst of people,
even in a one hundred percent red state.
My children run in, worried faces;
they can’t believe what happened the night before.
Fear blasts like fire from their eyes.
“You’ll be fine,” I say. “You’re citizens, you’ll be fine.”
“What about you?” asks the oldest.
I sigh. I don’t know the answer, but I tell him,
“I’ll be fine, too.”
When I’m alone,
tears flow, like a child’s, without control.
Confusion plunges deep in my brain.
Fear aches in my stomach. It is hard to breathe.
“I’ll be fine,” I say wiping my tears,
picking myself up from the floor,
like I’ve done so many times before.
But I can’t help thinking about the guy—
the guy in the business suit, years ago,
when I was a waitress at a fancy restaurant—
the guy who walked by my side and whispered,
“Go back to Mexico.”
No one heard, while I stood frozen.
I thought of this guy, and knew
that today, he had won.

 


Mariana Llanos is a Peruvian-born writer and poet. She has published eight children’s books. Her new work, Luca’s Bridge, is the story of a family who is deported to Mexico; it will be published in the Spring of 2018 by Penny Candy Books. Mariana studied Drama in her native Peru. She lives in Oklahoma with her three children and her husband. Find out more at www.marianallanos.com.

Also by Mariana Llanos: “Resiste / Resist,” a poem and translation.

Photo credit: Peter Stevens via a Creative Commons license.

Violent Citizenship

By Sakeena Amwaaj

Existence stamped onto
flattened prison.
Fluid bloodlines dried
into lines invisible
on land. Lines prick us
without our knowing,
weaving fortunes
weaving curses
upon generations.

 


Sakeena Amwaaj is a pen name, used because of the political climate in both the United State and the poet’s home country.

Photo credit: perceptions (on & off) via a Creative Commons license.

You’re Nightly Run Down

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By C. S. Guppy


Source: The New York Times evening briefings from February 13 – 15, 2017

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Justin Trudeau of
Canada went
smoothly.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe
returned home from
weekend golf outing
discussed response
to North Korea’s missile
test in full view
of diners

North Korea claims
its launch shows
the White House sent
mixed signals

On the homefront,
hitting a roadblock
in the quest
inside Trump Tower,
pressing on with
global deals

More harrowing details:
Canisters of chlorine
gas, a banned weapon,
were dumped
Russia, contrary to its
repeated claims, bombed
a major hospital

A California dam’s
Modern goddesses
come to life

The best and worst of
the American College of Physicians
Wait it out

Dairy industry
call on Congress to stop
makers of popular
plant-based alternatives

The 36 Questions
That Lead to Love
our latest
“Committed”
help

The resignation as President
Trump’s national
security adviser
was not entirely honest
—a new cruise missile

Mr. Trump
building relationships
with Arab countries
here
here
here

The police
assassination
found guilty of
murder and
kidnapping
the damaged
Oroville Dam

An influential
science advisory group
lent its support to
India as the
deadliest
in the world

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After trying
some
competing theories:
how to keep them
fresh—
Romantic
walk
at the Westminster
Kennel Club Dog Show

Finally,
set sights on
the White House,
nonpolitical

President Trump
could “live with”
a one-state solution;
anger and
bafflement among
Palestinians

Russia denied
repeated
contact with
Trump campaign

The resignation of
Michael T. Flynn,
the leaks from
American intelligence
agencies to the
news media,
a computer,
iOS device,
Android device

Andrew Puzder withdrew
from consideration

Our reporters make
a harrowing choice:
Here’s a guide to your rights

Throughout the
country, independent
bookstores
have taken on a new life
as centers of
resistance

Police in Malaysia
attack North Korea’s leader,
Kim Jong-un
Mr. Kim
has ordered
more
than
300
executions

For the second straight
year, traffic deaths were up

When all eyes were on her
Beyoncé won
at the Grammys

It’s never been
a next-generation

We are
alone
in the universe

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C.S. Guppy started out as a high school English teacher. That was so much fun, she decided to become a Sunday school director, then a desktop publisher, then a technical writer, then a graphic designer, then a copyeditor (for Ecotone literary journal), then a server, then a dog walker, then a mom, and most recently, an activist. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of North Carolina Wilmington in 2012. Her essays have appeared in The Sun and Alligator Juniper, with one forthcoming in Ruminate magazine. She lives in northern Colorado with her family.

Photo credit: Jeremy Keith via a Creative Commons license.

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Inaugural Bird Omens

By Annie Connole

inauguration (n.)

1560s, from French inauguration “installation, consecration,” and directly from Late Latin inaugurationem (nominative inauguratio) “consecration,” presumably originally “installment under good omens;” noun of action from past participle stem of inaugurare “take omens from the flight of birds; consecrate of install when omens are favorable,” from in– “on, in” (see in- (2)) + auguare “to act as an augur, predict” (see augur (n.))

 

“Keep your #eyes to the #skies tomorrow for the #inauguration for the #birds do no tell
#lies on how the #winds of change shall blow.”

– Maja D’Aoust, January 19, 2017

 

Signals Lost

The baby bird lay still in the sand beneath my gate. Open beak and neck, disproportionately larger than the rest of the tiny body, are stretched out, waiting to be filled.

Rain had been falling all through the final days of the last administration.

This story begins with the memory of hunger, depletion, lack. Signals lost when the landscape, the heart, and the head become waterlogged, and the scent, the sound that will lead home becomes obstructed by extreme weather.


There Will Be Blood

The rain keeps pouring.
In the center of the road, I find two perfect scarlet circles of blood beside a mourning dove with a wounded heart.

A Sacrifice, whispers the bird.
Of peace. Of love. Of messengers.

My heart bleeds next to the dove’s. My truck stalls before I go down the road to buy more paint so I can make a sign to say something about kindness and being awake and alive and powerful.


Prophesy

Why didn’t the coyotes take you?
I hear the story and prophecy.
Tell the village the dove is dead. Cries will be drowned out by the barking dogs.

I wonder, is it a relief to know what lies ahead?
Who will die this year? Will they be my father, mother, brother, lover, or one whose grace I have not yet seen?

Blood of roses disappears with the rain, an erasure of a life and death.

When does the blood of the bird
Become yours?

I do not pretend that this is anything but what it is.


I Know Why the Caged Bird Paces

Across the street lives a woman who is small with grey hair straight and curled under. Her skin is tan and taut. Her eyes, brown. Clothes hang on her bones.

She asks me to come inside. She needs help with her TV, with her doctor’s appointments. Calling her social worker. Figuring out how to get the physical therapy she needs to keep herself from falling over on her cement floor and cracking her head again.

A clear plastic sheet with a butterfly print separates her kitchen from the main room. In a single bed she sleeps there from late afternoon to pre-dawn. Through the butterfly veil, I see an elevated maze of several birdcages fashioned out of chicken wire, each containing one bird. Are they cages or just homes for birds?

Here in this house, I am asking if she has the card with the number of the social worker and I am looking at paperwork on hospital visits. Recommendation: Must wear oxygen mask when home. At all times.

The woman says, They want me to go to a home. But they can’t take me. I have my birds. I can’t go live in a home. What would happen to my birds?

I watch a pretty quail as she paces along the edge of her cube. Unlike the yellow cockatiel and the grey dove next to her, she appears free. Not fully caged. Three walls, not four. Wanting so much to touch ground. To go somewhere.

All the birds that live with the woman are broken in some way. For some, it may be just one wing that cannot fly. So they pace. She is pacing. Staying in motion. Stopping for too long would mean death.


Ancestors Speak

Down the block lives a man who voted for the new president. From across the fence he talks of jobs, global security, the price of everything.
When the man was very young, his mother took him to a Women’s March.
His mother enters. His mother, who has passed onto the other side, visits him as a hummingbird. She told him she would, and does.
The hummingbird flies over his head and back. Then stalls right there at the fence, fluttering in a cool hum in front of him.
Your mother is talking to you, I say.
I know.

A few days later, a woman tells me, our ancestors are always
Here among us, trying to reach us.

Let her in.


The Hen is a Hunter

I am at the neighbor’s farm, watching a baby alpaca dance, when a red hen runs through the stable, stealing something away.

As I watch her streak by, I look close to see what’s in her beak. It is grey. It writhes. A tail? A … mouse?

Yes, the hen will take the mouse and beat it until it is dead and smashed and she will peck at it …

The hen is a hunter? I had forgotten. For some, brutality and survival are one in the same.

 


Annie Connole, a Montana native, is a communications professional and multidisciplinary artist now based in California. She graduated from The New School with a B.A. in Arts in Context, and is pursuing an MFA in creative writing at University of California, Riverside.

Visit her website at www.AnnieConnole.com.

Photo credit: © 2017 Annie Connole.

Night Falls Before Morning

By Erica Gerald Mason

On Sunday night I began to read news on my phone,
after an afternoon spent fighting a chest cold
and watching old episodes of
new television shows.
I scanned three headlines with escalating
alarm and concern,
turned the phone off, and returned to the glow
of the larger screen.

Blinking away outrage like a hangover,
I closed my eyes to the world,
as information slipped under my skin.
I turned the phone back on and sought
dear friends at the familiar campsites
of profile pages and news feeds.

Her dog slept in the sun.
He had tacos for lunch.
She said Positive Vibes Only.
He said he never discusses politics.

Am I crazy? I thought.
I typed words of resistance.
But the right ones wouldn’t visit my mind.
Wouldn’t dance across my skin.
I sat in silent frustration for five minutes, ten.

Then:
All of this won’t happen if we don’t let it – I wrote.

I felt Sunday slipping away
as Monday waited outside my door. No more words came.
I turned off the light, placed the phone on the nightstand and
made myself as comfortable as possible in the dark.
Said goodnight and goodbye to
familiar campsites.
I closed my eyes and began to sleep
but I knew I wouldn’t again for a very long time.

 


Erica Gerald Mason is an author, poet, and speaker living in Acworth, Georgia. Erica writes about creativity, happiness, love, feminism, pop culture and current events. Her work appears in several publications and journals, and she was a featured poet in the 2016 and 2017 Sundance Film Festival Indie Lounge. Her book of poetry, I Am A Telescope: Science Love Poems is available on Kindle and paperback on Amazon. Find her blog and poetry at www.ericageraldmason.com.

Photo credit: Chetan Sarva via a Creative Commons license.

Inaugural Haiku

By Carla Drysdale

Damp Geneva seeps
into our cold feet marching
to protect women.

Stone sky tablet for
black calligraphy of trees
writing history.

The new president
says he’ll get rid of columns
when building new rooms.

The new president
says he’ll protect you from them
and then the rain falls.

The president’s mouth
puckers when he peers at us:
“I love you all now.”

 

Originally published in What Rough Beast, Indolent Books, 2017.


Carla Drysdale is the author of Little Venus (Tightrope Books, 2009) and Inheritance (Finishing Line Press, 2016). Her poems have appeared in LIT, The Tower Journal, Cleaver Magazine, PRISM International, The Same, Literary Review of Canada and The Fiddlehead, among other journals. She has work forthcoming in Nasty Women Poets: An Unapologetic Anthology of Subversive Verse, to be published by Lost Horse Press. In 2014, she won PRISM’s annual Earle Birney poetry prize and was nominated in 2015 for Bettering American Poetry. Born in Ontario, she lives with her husband and two sons in Ornex, France. Visit her website at www.carladrysdale.com.

Photo credit: Mahmood Salam via a Creative Commons license.

Moscow Mule Recipe

By Neleigh Olson

 

Ingredients

yellow hair

golden showers

systemic misogyny

an angry base

James Bond villains (Russian)

Twitter account

Directions

First, respond bigly, and I mean in a number one way, a terrific way, with the best words, to the number one tricky to our great nation. DO NOT COMPLETE SENTENCES. Keep one foreign friend under wraps, because you have so many friends it’s incredible, and these are the best, I mean smart, powerful people who. EXCLAMATION POINTS!!! Raise the temperature with coal we’re bringing coal back in big way, let me tell you, then beat the angry base with the idea they’ve been beaten long enough while sitting on a golden throne. TWEET ABOUT THIS. Declare the Russians good friends, tremendous friends. Shake well the foundation of democracy, decency, and international security. SAD! Distract!

Serve lukewarm, in a steady stream while your wife eats strings of diamonds. Pairs well with the most beautiful chocolate bomb cake.

 


Neleigh Olson is a fiction writer in the University of Kentucky’s MFA in creative writing program.

Photo credit: Kim Alaniz via a Creative Commons license.

Mother

By Noah Leventhal

 

the desert smells like Mother       stones
sundial their way across the dunes        reeking
of dust and blood and evaporation     a lizard

skitters across the scattered sand
each wretched bump in its thorny skin
a testament       drooping brittle grass

reaching up and down with thirst
when the ground shakes     when the wind
dies       when the heat digs deep below

the seas of crust and dust and age
you know Mother cries her paper
eyes out     Mother of blessings says time

is an illusion       this is why we rebuild cities
this is why the night markets churn
an ancient air with sugar       yeast and charcoal

smoke     beneath the rubble a Mother
sings her children out of memory       the markets
an illusion       the Mothers and their songs

of time     the wind       the stillness of the desert
Mother of capability knows        there are no
blessings       only candles that flicker and winds

still enough to let them       sunsets across the beige
expanse       rare things of beauty       curtains
in the window frames     woven in their likeness

houses return to sand       Mother
of capability doesn’t sing at night       she eats
and sleeps to meet the sun       Mother of sadness

rubs shoulders with Mother of peace        Mother
of wickedness trips across Mother of good
will     Mother of gentility interrupts Mother

of gaping wounds       Mother of dearth and poverty
gives to Mother of the rich       Mother of sunrise
lies with Mother of the night       Mother of your wishes

warms Mother of your fears       a million little deaths
descend       a future Mother’s mouth       raining upon
the mother                                   of all bombs

 

 


Noah Leventhal is a recent graduate of the classics program at St. John’s College in Santa Fe, New Mexico who currently lives in Los Angeles. As the grandson of a holocaust survivor, he was raised on the poetry of hope and resistance. Even on her deathbed, as other thoughts faded away, his grandmother’s tongue could recite Pushkin with perfect precision. Words stick with us, they become a part of who we are. The way we speak changes the way we think, and the way we think is everything.

Photo credit: Seniju via a Creative Commons license.

Take a Knee

by stephanie roberts

for Colin Kaepernick

 

Uncle Wade (that stubborn mule), grumbled
“Round them up!”
In what direction? I wondered.
The cane teams of the Caribbean?
or way back
to the cup and knuckle
of Gold Continent and trace origin.
“He’s half white.” I say, spitting cherry seed
against our worn bleached deck
a hard tear dark
hungry for soil’s soft capture.
Tired of the clip of this luxury of bile speech
tainting purple mountain
like the flagrant
spread of fall manure.
I knee down my throat lump of protest
thinking what is more American than that?

 


stephanie roberts has work featured or forthcoming, this year, in Reunion: The Dallas Review, The Stockholm Review of Literature, Room Magazine (Canada), Shooter Literary Magazine (UK), Burning House Press (UK), Rat’s Ass Review, The Inflectionist Review, After the Pause, The Thing Itself, Nano Text an anthology published by Medusas’s Laugh Press (as a contest finalist) and elsewhere. In 2016, she was a top ten finalist in Causeway Lit‘s fall poetry contest, and her work was featured in The New Quarterly, Blue Lyra Review, Contemporary Verse 2, and Breakwater Review. She grew up in Brooklyn, NY.

Photo credit: Miyukiutada via a Creative Commons license.

Mad, Times Four

By Cody Walker

He thought he saw the Sort of Men
He’d always Feared or Hated:
He looked again, and found it was
Eight Years, obliterated.
“It’s Sessions . . . Flynn . . . it’s everyone
Who—.” Silence, then. We waited.

He thought he saw his Dumb Concerns
(Exhausted, Getting Fat):
He looked again, and found it was
Dear God, some KOMPROMAT!
“My prayers are answered! Glory be!
Confirm this story, stat!”

He thought he saw a Thousand Rubles
Shoved inside Trump Tower:
He looked again, and found it was
Ivanka, looking dour.
“A thousand—that’s, what, sixteen bucks?!”
He laughed (for like an hour).

He thought he saw a Frightened Nation
Change its Locks and Keys:
He looked again, and found it was
Some guy on Twitter. “Pleeease!
Just tie him to a chair or something.
Feed him bits of cheese.”

 


Cody Walker is the author of The Self-Styled No-Child (Waywiser, 2016) and Shuffle and Breakdown (Waywiser, 2008). His poems have appeared in The New York Times, The Yale Review, Slate, Salon, and The Best American Poetry (2015 and 2007). His essays have appeared online in The New Yorker and the Kenyon Review. His new collection, The Trumpiad (Waywiser, 2017), was released in April; all proceeds will be donated to the ACLU. Visit Cody’s website at www.CodyWalker.net.

Photo credit: Daniel Oines via a Creative Commons license.

When You Plant Your Riot-Geared Feet

By Brooke Petersen

when you plant your riot-geared feet and say, we will brook no resistance, we say, listen to your own words. listen to this. listen: the Anglo-Saxon root brūcen means not to endure or tolerate, not to put up with, but to partake in. means, to need or require. to make use of as a right. to delight in. to brook resistance is to fist-up-fight-back because we have a need and a right and a joy—to hand-hold and arms-lock and shout. to brook resistance is to love resistance, to cling to it like rescue-rope, to heave and tug and drag yourself up from the water on its strength. listen to this, listen: when you say we will brook no resistance, you deny yourself joy.

when you say, we will brook no resistance, we say: then we will.

 


Brooke Petersen is a nonbinary poet who lives, teaches, and resists in San Diego, where they are pursuing an MFA. Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in Versal and on Blog this Rock (a Split This Rock affiliate).

Photo credit: K-B Gressitt.

Meeting Place

By Penny Perry

Author’s note: In August, 2008, Russian tanks and soldiers moved into the Republic of Georgia and killed 228 civilians. In March, 2014 under Putin, Russia seized Crimea. President Obama ordered sanctions against the Russians. Now, President Trump wants to remove the sanctions, and Putin wants to recapture the former territories of the Soviet Union. Trump’s admiration of Russia and his possible  collusion with Russian goals gives robust support to Russian aggression.

The Republic of Georgia, 2008 

Chain link fence, a field,
a narrow, wood bench,
shade from an untrimmed tree.
Sparrows still twittering
this August morning.

Maybe they are grandmothers,
wide white arms
in summer house dresses,
open-toed shoes.

The one on the bench in black,
a babushka on her head.

The other, a red print dress
with English letters.
Maybe, only a moment before
she stood, small purse in hand,
gray curls and dress flapping
in the slight breeze.

Maybe the woman in black smiled,
a story on her lips.

Now, wild ivy in her hair.
The red dress hiked above the knees,
white turnip legs stretched out,
purse near curved fingers.
Blood on her nose and forehead.
Eyes open, as if surprised
by the icy crackle of gunfire.

Her friend sits crying.
Two fresh loaves of bread
on the bench beside her.

 


Penny Perry is a five time Pushcart Prize nominee. Her first poetry collection, Santa Monica Disposal & Salvage, was published in 2012 by Garden Oak Press. Her new collection, Father Seahorse, will be published by Garden Oak Press in 2017.

Russian invasion force photo credit: Yana Amelina (Амелина Я. А.), via a Creative Commons license.

Aprons

By Joyce Teed

Appalling
that we have to
don our aprons
once again
clean this mess up
once and for all
and start beating
like a country
with one heart
beat
feed the lost
address the loss
of
one country
indivisible
and clean the
talking sheets
out of this
country
once and for all
making the bed
of safety
for one and
for all
forever
cleaning away hate
cooking love and
ironing away
our shame
at having let
our house
get so
dirty.

 


Joyce Teed

I am a light seeker. Teaching American literature for thirty years to high school juniors continues to be my passion. I am appalled that textbook companies in Texas are still trying to revise and ignore Native American genocide and Slavery, the number one and two sins of the United States— and that the current administration of these United States seems to be fostering racism and white nationalism to an extreme I never envisioned. I am not even considering retiring. There is too much work to do, and students need to see and hear from seasoned teachers who remember the Civil Rights era and believe in an America that embraces all people. Since DT’s reign, I have written a poem a week. Who knew that he was the muse I was waiting for?

Illustration credit: “Folding the Sheet,” a painting in progress by Rick and Brenda Beerhorst via a Creative Commons license.

deity’s daughter

By Nikia Chaney

memories are
like the ringing
of bells sharp
bells she
hangs on
the trees
on the hair of her
little girl the little
girl who
shakes her
braids to feel
cool beads
bang on the ear
the shoulder
blade we walk
to catch sweat
and dew
in the morning sweat
and salt and warm
cold so the woman
the woman places
the dark blanket on
the curled up child
the child kissing
us with wind and need
loneliness echoing
and losing itself down
the hall all
these stars buzzing
their pools on the sidewalk
a black sidewalk
full of chalk black
buildings scored
in the heart the
braid in her
hair falling
loose how we would
do anything
to give her a world
in which she had
worth and i
remember yesterday
she drew a dandelion
up to the sky
and blew and
blew and we clung
onto skirts
and we learned
to breathe

 


Nikia Chaney is the current Inlandia Literary Laureate (2016-2018). She is the author of two chapbooks, Sis Fuss (Orange Monkey Publishing, 2012) and ladies, please (dancing girl press, 2012). She is founding editor of shufpoetry, an online journal for experimental poetry, and founding editor of Jamii Publishing, a publishing imprint dedicated to fostering community among poets and writers. She has won grants from the Money for Women Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, Poets & Writers and Cave Canem. She teaches at San Bernardino Valley College. Visit Nikia’s website at NikiaChaney.com.

Photo credit: Shardayyy via a Creative Commons license.

familial observation

by Amanda N. Butler

The family
that rallied
against my
first molester
is the same
that voted for
the man
who said
he could grab
me by the
pussy.

 


Amanda N. Butler is the author of two chapbooks, Tableau Vivant (dancing girl press, 2015) and effercrescent, to be published this fall by the same press. Her poetry has also appeared in poems2go, Haikuniverse, NatureWriting and ALTARWORK, among others. She can be found online at arsamandica.wordpress.com.

Photo credit: torbakhopper via a Creative Commons license

Border Children on the News

By Laura Grace Weldon

Frantic families send their children
past drug runners and thieves,
through deserts, on tops of freight trains,
over 1,700 miles seeking
refuge at our border.

Tonight, we tweeze sushi into our mouths
under a blast of chilled Happy Hour air.
Screens broadcast dark-eyed children
behind chain link fences
while protestors chant
Go back home! and U-S-A!

A congressman vows to expedite
their return to where they belong.
“Yeah, deprived of a hearing,” we mutter
and a guy eating spicy duck wings
next to us says “There are laws for a reason.”

Agile in conflict studies,
the bartender sets out
complimentary edamame.
Offers refills.
Changes the TV station.
Lets the comprehensible violence
of hockey soothe
as our drinks arrive.

 

“Border Children on the News” was previously published by Blue Collar Review.


Laura Grace Weldon is the author of a poetry collection titled 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: United Soybean Board via a Creative Commons license.

Attitude

By Brigitte Goetze

 

The alternative ways are in stark opposition, but if she works patiently through her difficulties, trusting herself to life, living each day as fully and as truly as possible, seeking through sincerity of living to solve the problem of their opposition, she may perhaps find a way to a reconciliation.
                                                                           – M. Esther Harding, The Way of All Women

Power will have its way,
no matter how damned
its path. Like flood water
it will widen a small crack,
splitting the land into two,
uprooting what stands innocently
in its commandeered course.

You, who live upstream,
pick up whatever tool you have,
shovel, wheelbarrow, hoe,
rush up the Hill, help
draw a ditch across the slope,
diverting the deluge’s downpour
away from seedlings and old shrubs.

And you, who live downstream,
join your neighbors,
fill sandbags or nourish those
working: many a place can be
cordoned off from the swollen,
murky, ice-cold torrent against which
weapons of war are useless.

Energy cannot be destroyed, but
it can be channeled. Even if some will not
be protected from the inevitable
mud flow, yet, it may not devour all.
We are able, willing, and ready
to defend with our hands and hearts
what we have labored so hard to built.


Brigitte Goetze lives in Western Oregon. A retired biologist and angora goat farmer, she now divides her time between her writing and fiber works. She finds inspiration for both endeavors in nature and in the stories and patterns handed down from generation to generation. Her words have been published by, among others, Calyx, Women Artist’s Datebook 2011, New Verse News, Oregon Humanities, Agave Literary Journal, Pyrokinection, and in such anthologies as Love Letters, On the Dark Path, and Element(ary) My Dear. Visit her website at brigittegoetzewriter.com.

“Attitude” was originally published by NewVerse.News.

Photo credit: U.S. Library of Congress.

Nevertheless, She Persisted

By Carolyn Norr

I followed her to the sea,
she placed ripe pineapples
in the frothing waves that had swallowed
her ancestors and were still swallowing.

The river led to the sea and was laced
with mine tailings
that silenced the frogs and swelled
her son’s bones till he burst.
I followed her to the courthouse to tell.

We knew what was going to happen.
I winced before the bullet hit.
It was her daughter who dragged her
to a quieter place and tended the wound,
chanting under her breath, mami, mami
her brow wet and salty.

I followed her through the broken streets
of the city, walking not fast, not slow
because she held also the hand of her nephew
and the scarves we wrapped around our faces
didn’t quite keep the sting of the gas out
so when tears dripped to the corners of our mouths
we swallowed them.

I followed her through the desert,
hung on her back and tried
not to be too heavy. You are not
too heavy.  She told me. But
I could smell her sweat.

I sat with her in the patch of garden
she tended, along the side of the painted apartments
below the orange pine the bark beetles feasted on
the long hot winter. She brought buckets of water
to the seeds, and the seeds, after all
opened. She sighed.

I held her with a cord finer than a hair,
held her lightly in my womb
almost not touching.
I told her what was going to happen.
I warned her. I gave her a choice.
Nevertheless, she persisted.

 


Carolyn Norr is a mother and youth worker in Oakland, CA. In chewing over the recent accusation of persistence, she thought of the many women in her neighborhood and around the world who persist in seeking life. She also thought of her own children.

Photo credit: Neville Wootton Photography via Visualhunt / Creative Commons license

Vandals Desecrate Jewish Cemetery

By Laura Budofsky Wisniewski

Not that it’s such a fancy graveyard,
just a hill, a mess,
stones leaning on each other
like the fathers of the bride and groom
after the wedding.
Our names are almost gone,
covered by a weeping moss.
I begged my son before I went, just burn me.
Do they listen?
Under all this dirt, tattooed numbers glow
like fireflies.
My Yacob used to say:
They’re never done with us.
And I would think, so dark an eye
in such a handsome man?
Now his headstone’s cracked like an egg.
Desecration?
Let’s face it.
Small animals and even bears
have squatted on our sacred ruins.
That’s not what drags my bones
here, as if fear were a wolf’s tooth.
No, it’s that I let myself believe
the world was getting better.

 


Laura Budofsky Wisniewski writes and teaches yoga in a small town in Vermont. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Calyx, Minerva Rising, Hunger Mountain, Pilgrimage and other journals. Her grandparents were immigrants fleeing persecution.

Photo credit: Chany Crystal via a Creative Commons license.

Something There Is That Doesn’t Love

By Olga Livshin

…people like me. Does not like our sweatshirts,
pilled, our backpacks, full of bric-a-brac,
us, detained, on the floor, airport animals.
Something has claimed that my adopted
country’s autobiography of openness
is finished. Something opens the mouths
of my Jewish immigrant family to mutter:
good for those terrorists to wait,
hope their turn doesn’t come.
So thank you to all of you,
who sprang to protest when something
forbade people who are like me. Thank you
for translating your memory of Babcia, of
Abuelita, into this mom, traveling home.
Your act of translation climbs over walls,
a prankster with tired eyes. It helps us
know each other. Gently it joins our hands
with Mr. Frost’s, asking, just one more time:
why would anyone help? What
doesn’t love a wall? And the cheeky poet
goes on hinting: “It is not elves, exactly…”


Olga Livshin is a poet, essayist and literary translator. Her work is forthcoming from The Kenyon Review and The International Poetry Review, and it has appeared in Jacket, Blue Lyra Review, Mad Hatters’ Review, and other journals. Livshin is commended by CALYX journal’s Lois Cranston Memorial Poetry Prize, Cambridge Sidewalk Poetry Project, Poets & Patrons Chicagoland Poetry Competition, and the Robert Fitzgerald Translation Prize (twice). She is the founder of White Oak Workshop, a collective that teaches creative Top of FormBottom of Form writing through responses to literature outside the Anglo-American canon. She lives in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania with her family. Visit her website at www.olga-livshin.com.

Photo credit: K-B Gressitt © 2017