Poetry – Page 6 – Writers Resist

Two Poems by Ron Dowell

We Are What We Shine

after J. Venters and M. Barajas

Bright as a jewel, we are what we shine.
A gang’s red-blue color-coded word clash
Compton’s graffitied not-so “Welcome” sign.

Compton Court obliterates the blue skyline,
Angeles Abbey minarets, brown grass,
like burnished silver, we are what we shine.

We suffer potholed streets silent decline
show taxes limit terms make thunder crash
Compton’s graffitied not so “Welcome” sign.

Change old habits & shade the asinine
who pour concrete slabs over weeping ash
as a begrimed city loses its shine.

Compton Creek crawdads, waters unwind
spawn Dr. Dre, Coste-Lewis, Niecy Nash.
Compton’s artists unveil the “Welcome” sign

Our shimmering gold—Venus, Kendrick’s rhymes
Venters, Barajas, their COVID backlash
bright as a jewel, we are what we shine.

Compton rolls out our “Welcome” sign.

• • • • • •

Ebonics

My native tongue felt perfectly normal
until they labeled it Ebonics in the 70s.
School disparaged my native tongue

like jazz, denigrated and disrespected.
The principal paddled me with the holey oak.
The new whip burned my ass, lashing and tentacled.

He tried to beat out vernacular for sleeping
through American heroes like Jefferson Davis
Father Serra, Charles Lindbergh. For his doctorate

a man discovered the new Negro language.
Even today, I violate grammar rules, unconscious
even today, I slip forward, or back, into natural speech

even today, I sing coded enslaved spirituals
Wade in the water, cause God’s gonna trouble the water
hounds don’t follow when we wade in the water.

Ah ‘on know what homie be doin. He be runnin’
They say a child’s personality forms by age five
–knowing two languages, he knows two worlds.

I learned a new language, but the new world hides.
I’m burdened, weighted, an imposter in a world
that squeezes me like a piece of coal.

Under pressure, like a black diamond, I sparkle dark
and hard I chew steel.

Ron L. Dowell holds two Master’s degrees from California State University Long Beach. In June 2017, he received the UCLA Certificate in Fiction Writing. His poetry resides in Penumbra, Writers Resist, Oyster Rivers Pages, The Wax Paper, Kallisto Gaia Press, The Penmen Review, Packingtown Review Journal, and The Poeming Pigeon. He’s a 2018 PEN America Emerging Voices Fellow. Visit his website at crookedoutofcompton.com.

Photograph, City of Compton.

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Letter to Aminu

By Ololade Akinlabi Ige

After Salawu Olajide

Dedicated to my country, Nigeria

What greets you when you get here?
Walls of broken spines? Fences of bleeding bruises?
Burnt roofs that open mouths? Windows with wounded hearts?
Your father was a victim of the last bomb explosion
and his grave grows mushroom flowers.
Your mother is an able handicap; on her cleavage are signatures of poverty.
Hauwa, your sister, was shot by Boko Haram.
That day, the clouds wept and the sky shrank.
Hakim, your brother, became a courageous coward.
He fled to Ibadan on a day the night was burnt to ashes.
That was the day we counted our dead and forgot numbers.

What greets you when you get here?
Your father’s house that stands on one leg?
Or your uncle in the wheelchair?
Maybe your friend with broken arms?
Or Amina, your girlfriend with a bleeding vagina?
Our village is a womb that harbours silence.
Children no longer cry aloud, instead they sob silently
like their fathers do when coffins are thrown into six feet.

What then can greet you when you get here?
Men of khaki marching on the hungry soil,
bullets of bandits diving in the space,
blood of innocent souls burbling like a fountain,
Almajiris holding their future in empty bowls,
or wails of a mother who just buried a son.
Maybe Mr. President, whose visit is for a mass burial.

Yet under an umbrella we still remain as one.
Mr. President said our war is technically defeated.
With one signed accord, we believe we shall see
to the end of the war that ate your sister and father.

Ololade Akinlabi Ige is a Nigerian poet. His works have featured in Muse for World Peace Anthology, 84 Delicious Bottles of Wine for Wole Soyinka, Word Rhymes and Rhythm (WRR) anthology, Sabr Literary Magazine, Wreath for a Wayfarer, Songs of Peace: The World’s Biggest Anthology of Poetry 2020, Dissonance Magazine (UK), Voice Journal (USA), Teach. Write. Journal (USA), dyst Literary Journal (Austrialia), Northern Otter Press Journal (Canada), Levitate Magazine (Chicago, USA), Harbor Review (USA), and 2020 Anthology (Canada) among others.

Photograph courtesy of RNW.org via a Creative Commons license.

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War Ghazal

By Linda Laderman

Again, we witness panicked people fleeing war.
You tell me, people don’t care, it’s Ukraine’s war.

Sitting in an Ann Arbor bistro, we order baked Turkish eggs,
& I mumble, even Turkey opposes this war.

One booth over, a woman applies siren red lipstick,
then gestures at the screen over the bar. A televised war.

Empty trains rumble down tracks outside the restaurant.
The chef rings a bell. Everyone cheers, detached from war.

At Costco, gas lines stretch into the street. A driver
hollers to the car behind him, price gouging, a gas war!

A man in army fatigues stands outside the corner CVS,
hawking Ukrainian flag pins. He shouts, no more war.

Down the block, neighbors discuss Ukraine’s desolation.
Isolated in a hospital basement, patients huddle. Pawns of war.

You switch on news of war-weary crowds cramming trains.
I shut it off. Suspended in silence, the distant din of war.

In an ordinary neighborhood, a mother, her children lie dead.
What more do we need to know about this fucking war?

Pleas for ammunition, boots on the ground, a no-fly zone.
We send sanctions & drones. Ukraine, it’s your war.

Babyn Yar, 33,771 Jews murdered by bullets in a Ukrainian ravine.
We agree Zelensky, never again! Still, fire fuels a madman’s war.

Linda Laderman grew up in Toledo, Ohio. She earned an undergraduate degree in journalism from the E. W. Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio. Her news stories, features and poetry have appeared in media outlets, magazines and literary journals, most recently in 3rd Wednesday Quarterly of Literary and Visual Arts and The Scapegoat Review. She returned to school in the 1990s, graduating with a Master’s of Liberal Studies and a Juris Doctor degree from The University of Toledo. Linda currently lives in the Detroit area. For the last decade, she has volunteered as a docent at the Zekelman Holocaust Center, and recently gave her time as a writer and case screener for the Wayne County Detroit Conviction Integrity Unit.

Photograph by manhhai via a Creative Commons license.

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Two Poems by Victoria Barnes

A Cosmic Dirty Story

—from the New York Times, 9 August 1945

From an open door in the sky,

the threshold of a new industrial art.

To the earth, an explosion of red:

the new and terrifying weapon.

In the morning newspaper, images arrive:

an imagination-sweeping experiment.

As we read the story, we learn—

The great bomb … harnesses the power of the universe to destroy the enemy by concussion, blast and fire.

With the fire, we consider our victory:

eminent scientists gathered, frankly fearful to witness the results of the invention, which might turn out to be either the salvation or the Frankenstein’s monster of the world.

In the glory of it all, the flash was pure—

an element of elation in the realization that we had perfected this devastating weapon.

Yet in our blindness an ocean apart, we see no blood.

What has been done … is the greatest achievement of organized science in history.

In reading more, we smell no cinders.

Practically all living things, human and animal, were literally seared to death.

In listening for imagined voices, we hear no calls.

We are more prepared to obliterate more rapidly and completely.

In turning away, we relish no victory.

The cruel sight resulting from the attack is so impressive that one cannot distinguish between men and women killed by the fire. The corpses were too numerous to be counted.

In knowing now, we reject our place:

What is this terrible new weapon, which the War Department also calls the ‘Cosmic Bomb’?

Coda:

In knowing now, we reject our place:

How will these righteous-thinking American people feel about the way their war leaders are perpetuating this crime against man and God?

Liberty Island

Give me your cliff
your cloud
your dreamy vision
of birds and fog
and flying

in the whir and whirl

of industry and asphalt
and commuters
in sooty rain—

of mothers and babies
and withered neglect
in malaise maligned—

with searing tears
I lift my lamp
but shut
the golden door.

Victoria Barnes has studied mythology, creative nonfiction, poetry, bookbinding, metaphoric thinking, and a bunch of other seemingly unrelated mishmash. She did not take math past high school, an accomplishment given her too many college degrees. She endeavors in taking photos and writing poetry. Currently she is writing a cycle of poems imagining Amelia Earhart’s thoughts on each airborne leg of her last flight and studying the skies in her travels, especially in the Southwest U.S.

Photo credit: Daniel Horacio Agostini via a Creative Commons license.

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America Cares . . . Thoughts & Prayers

By Phyllis Wax

Fly the flag at half-mast
all the time

because every day,
someone kills himself
or someone else
or a bunch of someones

with a gun.

Fly the flag at half-mast
because America loves guns

more than she loves people.

Social issues are a major focus of Milwaukee poet Phyllis Wax. Among the anthologies and journals in which her poetry has appeared are: Rhino, The Widows’ Handbook, Birdsong, Spillway, Peacock Journal, Surreal Poetics, Naugatuck River Review, New Verse News, Portside, Star 82 Review. She has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, as well as the Best of the Net and Bettering American Poetry anthologies. You can reach her at: poetwax38@gmail.com.

Photo credit: Fibonacci Blue via a Creative Commons license.

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Choice

By Erica Goss

I’m sixteen. School
thinks I have the flu. I tell
the doctor to
knock me out. In
the alley behind the clinic, men
wait in cars.
They leave their
engines rumbling. Backseat
speakers vibrate.
My mother drives
me home.
I’m thirty-seven. Work
thinks I
had a miscarriage. I tell
the doctor to knock
me out. At the
hospital gift shop I buy
myself a bouquet of roses.
Classic rock plays
from the radio. My
husband drives me
home. I am not
sorry. I am not
ashamed. I saved one
from a teen-aged
mother. I saved the other
from her damaged body. There’s no
music for that. No
songs.

A brief bio: Erica Goss is the winner of the 2019 Zocalo Poetry Prize. Her collection, Night Court, won the 2017 Lyrebird Award from Glass Lyre Press. Recent and upcoming publications include Creative Nonfiction, North Dakota Quarterly, Spillway, A-Minor, Redactions, Consequence, The Sunlight Press, The Pedestal, San Pedro River Review, and Critical Read. Erica served as Poet Laureate of Los Gatos, California, from 2013-2016. She lives in Eugene, Oregon, where she teaches, writes and edits the newsletter Sticks & Stones.

Photo by cottonbro from Pexels.

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Two Poems by Amelia Díaz Ettinger

Brown-Headed Cowbird

Molothrus ater

I know what it’s said about me

that I am a bad mother
a brood parasite

—no

I know I relinquish
my eggs to the care of others
but notice; I take my time
watching in torture-wait until
I find her,
the perfect host
a serious, smaller, caring
female in this fragile world
where hatchlings are unattended
—no

even though you think I’m vile
to throw one—or two—of her
eggs out of her nest,
my babies will hatch first
it’s not my fault
she prefers their size
and look—
who can resist their opened
beaks, a rosy-red
that disgraces any flower
—no

I do what I naturally do
to make sure my own
have the best success
you can call me what you may
—but in my place,
for the sake of them
—not your own
would you
have the courage
to do the same?

The Wild Turkey Is a Good Mother

Meleagris gallopavo

a native to the Americas
with a name derived by accident
what did they know in England?

when you arrived at those shores
from boats ferried by Turkish merchants
i prefer your name in Spanish— Gallopavo

kin to the Gallinules that walk on water
lilies that dress in raucous colors—not you
—except for your head, you are dowdy

better for concealment as you lay
your eggs on dry leaves, and land
unsteady—and loud—on tree branches

you’re boisterous without melody, but the reward
in the camaraderie of your rafters
aunts, mothers, and grandmothers take care

of everyone’s poult as their own
—that is why you thrive while the male
opens his wings and tail to allure—

and i wonder how it is to receive all that sheen
from love, from care?

Amelia Díaz Ettinger is a ‘Mexi-Rican,’ born in México but raised in Puerto Rico. As a BIPOC poet and writer, she has two full-length poetry books published; Learning to Love a Western Sky by Airlie Press, and a bilingual poetry book, Speaking at a Time /Hablando a la Vez by Redbat Press, and a poetry chapbook, Fossils in a Red Flag by Finishing Line Press. Her poetry and short stories have appeared in literary journals and anthologies. Amelia Díaz Ettinger has an MFA in creative writing from Eastern Oregon University. Presently, she and her partner reside in Summerville, Oregon with two dogs, two cats, and too many chickens.

Photo by 42 North from Pexels.

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Only the Meek

By Dotty LeMieux

Where are the birds of spring?

I see bees—are there enough?

Black carpenter ants—we never had them before—
emerge from some dusky damp place
beneath the foundation.

We live in a house of cards.

Even a bear takes exception
to exceptional times
and climbs a backyard tree
he must have crossed mountains
and dried up stream beds to reach.
I hope he got sustenance
out of the dogs’ bowl.

Every night, creatures mate or die
or wail their diminishment
in our backyard, alarming the dogs,
snug in cushioned beds.

Every morning the weather is our bearer of bad news:

Don’t put away the winter clothes
but don’t skimp
on the skimpy.

Gas, lumber, even food scarcer and more costly
because all are vulnerable now
as never before.

Or is just that we are now forced
to face it?

Now that I think of it, dogs
resemble domestic bears
who can’t climb trees.

Squirrels outwit us all.

The nighttime creatures burrow deep
into ground we have given up for dead.
Is this what they mean by the meek

shall inherit the earth?

So why do we still struggle:

to remain upright
to stretch toward breathable air
to stay alive long enough
to inherit what’s left?

Dotty LeMieux is the author of four chapbooks, Five Angels, Five Trees Press; Let Us Not Blame Foolish Women, Tombouctou Books; The Land, Smithereens Press, and most recently Henceforth I Ask Not Good Fortune, Finishing Line Press. In the late 1970s to mid-1980s, she edited the eclectic literary and art journal Turkey Buzzard Review in the poetic haven of Bolinas, California. Her work has appeared in numerous print and online journals and anthologies, including Writers Resist. Dotty lives in Northern California with her husband and two aging dogs, where she practices environmental law and helps elect progressive candidates to office. Read more at her blog.

Photo credit: Jerzy Durczak via a Creative Commons license.

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Changing Names

Mendocino, California

By Frederick Livingston

after how many years
does “drought” erode
into expected weather?

and then what name
when the rains do come
startling the hard earth
the exhausted aquifers?

we’ll sing to the deep wells
the quieted fire and clean sky
“winter” brittle in our mouths

holding vigil for rivers elders
insects lovers lost forever
when did grieving season begin?
what one word could walk

between delight of sun
hungry skin and unease
in receiving unseasonable gifts?

what of the breath we held
together as cold certainty melts
wondering who burns this turn?
when the broken record

record breaking
dips into new pallets
for our purple summers

the wheel becomes
rows of teeth clenched
against steady instability
in which season do we open

our jaws lungs ears hearts
speak our fears
how it feels to be alive

on Earth still
blooming and unraveling
naming petals
as the wind claims them

Frederick Livingston plants seeds. Grounded in experiential education and sustainable agriculture, he hopes to grow understanding, peace, mangos and avocados. His upcoming poetry collection, The Moon and Other Fruits, is expected in early 2023 from Legacy Book Press.

Photo credit: “Drought,” by Wayne S. Grazio via a Creative Commons license

Photographer’s note: A honeybee, desperate and disoriented, seeks moisture and pollen from dried up sage blossoms. Another sign of climate change.

A note from Writers Resist:

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

Elegy at the End of a Beach Walk

By Ellen Girardeau Kempler

Heat buffets us seaward.
Sunburn sends us home.

We trail wakes
of bags & butts
clamshell packages
& coffee cups.

Styrofoam seeds
sprout like alien plants
neoprene petals
band aid leaves.

Straws take root
in tangled kelp.

Saltwater & sun degrade.

Waves & currents take away.

Great Garbage Patch.

Undersea pyre.

Microplastic harvest
fills the widening gyre.

Turning & turning
in the trash-dimmed tide.
things fall apart.

Ellen Girardeau Kempler’s poems have appeared in Tiny Seed Literary Journal, Narrative Northeast, Writers Resist, Phoenix Rising Review, Gold Man Review, Orbis International Poetry Quarterly and many other small presses and anthologies. In 2016, she won Ireland’s Blackwater International Poetry Prize and honorable mention in Winning Writers’ Tom Howard/Margaret Reid Poetry Contest. Called “a timely and powerful selection of climate poetics,” her chapbook, Thirty Views of a Changing World: Haiku + Photos, was published in December 2017 by Finishing Line Press.

Photo by Debbie Hall, a Writers Resist poetry editor

A note from Writers Resist:

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

Right to Life

By Remy Dambron

Imagine instead
if we incentivized our citizens

to stalk and spy on
to report and incriminate

those among us preparing
for an assault,

purchasing pistols
brandishing rifles and boasting bump stocks

customizing scopes and fastening silencers
loading up on boxes of bullets intended

to pierce our flesh
to break our bones

to end the beating
of the bleeding hearts

of our brethren.

I wonder then
how the conversation

about the sanctity of life
would go.

Remy is an activist whose work focuses on denouncing political corruption and advocating for social justice. His poetry has appeared in What Rough Beast, New Verse News, Poets Reading the News, Society of Classical Poets, and Writers Resist. He credits his wife, also his chief editor, for his growth and development as a Portland-based writer. Visit Remy’s website.

Illustration by Stephen Melkisethian via a Creative Commons license.

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

Equity Begins at Home

By Katherine West

Equity is something that is dealt with in D.C. or not dealt with in those red states that still use the “n” word or in big cities with big crime . . . where is the white channel on this police radio? not in this small town in this blue state where the Apaches still dance not here where artists and tweakers share the park where beaters and hummers share the road where the governor is Hispanic and a woman and we were all vaccinated in a timely manner not in this small house where the one who cooks never does the dishes, no, equity is not an issue here, not in our bed where I cannot sleep at night too full of all the words I must not speak in the day, words that choke as well as any outlawed police hold so that from not being able to speak I arrive at not being able to breathe to think to dance with the Apaches, the Salsa band, R & B on the KKK station my feet only move the way the hanged man’s twitch even after he’s dead even though I’m not dead am I? in my blue state art town where the rainbow coalition picnics together at the same big table in the shade where I, wearing my silence and my pink apron, serve a meal I must not eat.

Katherine West lives in Southwest New Mexico. She has written four collections of poetry: The Bone Train, Scimitar Dreams, Riddle, and Raising the Sparks. Her poetry has also appeared in many journals, including Writing in a Woman’s Voice, Lalitamba, Bombay Gin, New Verse News, Tanka Journal, Splash!, Eucalypt, and Southwest Word Fiesta, as well as in art exhibitions at the Light Art Space gallery in Silver City, New Mexico, and at the Windsor Museum in Windsor, Colorado. Katherine has two published novels, under the pen name Kit West: Lion Tamer and When Night Comes, A Christmas Carol Revisited, the latter published by Breaking Rules Publishing (BRP), for whom she teaches creative writing workshops. A sequel to When Night Comes—Slave, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Revisited—is pending publication by BRP. Follow Katherine on Facebook.

Illustration, “Twice Born Woman,” by Katherine (Kit) West. From Katherine:

My lino cuts are inspired by nature, spirituality, and social justice. They do not attempt perfection, rather, they aim to suggest the mystical moment of connection, either with an idea, a flower, or a sudden understanding of justice. At the center of my work is love. The true work of the human animal. Our only hope.

See more of her work on her Facebook artist page.

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

26 Oct. 2020: A rap on Barrett’s confirmation to the U.S. Supreme Court

By Kathleen Minor

The dude who refused to denounce white supremacy,
tried to nuke a hurricane and our democracy,
puts kids in cages and promotes segregation.
That dude? Rewrote the Declaration.
We hold these truths to be self-evident:
If you ain’t white, you must be irrelevant.

Listen.
There seems to be some confusion.
We’ve been called violent and angry and useless
and brainwashed, educated and clueless.
With RBG gone, we are Ruthless.

They want us defeated and silenced.
But we built this country to protest a tyrant.
We waged war, and wrote a Constitution
in order to form a more perfect union.
So God bless your trickle-down caste system, yo.
This is America.
The caste system votes.

Kathleen Minor graduated in May 2019 from Berry College with a B.A. in Creative Writing and now volunteers as an assistant coach for the Berry College speech and debate team and as a leader for the Democratic Party of Georgia. Her work has appeared in Ramifications Magazine, Riggwelter Press, and Terror House Magazine, and her poetry received the Academy of American Poets Award from Berry College. She currently lives in Dalton, Georgia. Follow her on Instagram: @thoughttrainderailed.

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

A Letter for My Unborn Daughter

By Debasish Mishra

Dear daughter, this is a dark world

Light is a mere plaything
and if you were present here
it’d diffract through the window
and fall on your orange cheeks
like petals of the sun

But darkness is real

How do I define it?

Wherever you go, it’ll follow
in the stares of those shameless eyes
and those hands that grope
the genitals and laugh
and boast their bare brazenness,
seeking medals for their phalluses

You can’t stare back
No, you are not permitted to!
If you dare, you may be
stripped of your wings
or splashed with acid and acrimony

You can’t run to the cops too
Even their uniforms are stained
with sins and semen and blood

Who will help you, my love?
Who will shield you from
the stares and stabs,
the lust and locusts?

How long will I water your seed
with my tears and prayers and hopes?

Stay in the womb forever, I plead
That’s the safest place I know

Or wait till the world becomes an orchard
where you can hop and fly and kiss
the rainbow of your dreams someday

Debasish Mishra, a native of Bhawanipatna, Odisha, India, is the recipient of The Bharat Award for Literature in 2019 and The Reuel International Best Upcoming Poet Prize in 2017. His recent poems have appeared in North Dakota Quarterly, Penumbra, trampset, Star*Line, Enchanted Conversation, Spaceports & Spidersilk, and elsewhere. His poems are also forthcoming in The Headlight Review, Space & Time, Bez & Co and Quadrant. A former banker with United Bank of India, he is presently engaged as a Senior Research Fellow at National Institute of Science Education and Research, HBNI, Bhubaneswar, India.

Photo credit: “Father & Daughter” by Dean White via a Creative Commons license.

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

⌘lzibongo for Black Women

By Kai Coggin

a praise poem, after JP Howard, for my Sisters

praise you Black Woman
because you never be praised enough
let me lift your collective name here
let me strip you of all your forced-on shame here
praise you for the stars that unfold when you smile
praise you for the way moons rise in your eyes
praise you for your tragic hope and sacrifice
life for you ain’t been no crystal stair
but you still keep climbin’ on
praise Langston’s mama
praise her wisdom and truth

praise you Black Woman
because you never be praised enough
praise be your laugh
let me say that again because it’s the song
that makes the planet spin
praise be your laugh
how it cackles and coos loud brassy beautiful
unafraid and unbroken
honey and fire

praise you Black Woman
because you never be praised enough
praise your natural hair and its curls
how whole galaxies swirl in the furls of you
praise your box braids and your twist outs
praise your locs and your bantu knots
praise how I got a Sister whose afro blocks out the sun
praise how I got another Sister whose afro is so tall
God uses it for a microphone
infuses her as gospel
Black Woman
praise your fingers braiding and trading beads
and weaving histories into wild glorious hair
the ceremony of pulling
praise your pulling
praise your pushing
pushing back on all that no longer makes room
for your crown
here Queen— here is your crown

praise the Motherland of your womb
how everything comes from you
and is stolen from you
and is returned to you again in glory
or entombed
I can’t begin to know your story but
praise you Black Mama
forgive us for what we have done
and all that we still do
how we don’t do right by your Black sons
how they are followed all their lives
by the shadows of guns
and how your Black daughters atlas the weight
of systemic cycles yet undone
and you still teach them to lift their faces to the sun
praise Breonna Taylor right here

praise you Black Woman
how you still raise continents of sons and daughters
despite their predisposition to being slaughtered
how the Atlantic ocean is still found in your transatlantic tears
the salt of you betrayed and splayed out
creating lands under your feet from all your centuries of grief
praise you as homeland
praise you as shore of a brighter world
praise the holy map of you
praise the North Star
that hangs from your earlobe like a pearl
praise you Black Mama
for how you hold the world
praise your swaddle and thick body
your warmth and your song
how you lullaby the night with a defiant hope
praise your hope
praise your dreams
praise the scripture of your face
praise the lines on your hands and crows-feet hymns
make an altar of my tongue
so that my words are poetic reparation
burn nag champa and sage in praise of your fire
praise be your fire
praise your persistence and your resistance
praise how you Harriet your children to a new freedom
praise how you Rosa until someone else offers you a seat at the table
praise how you Audre deliberate and afraid of nothing
praise how you Maya rising and phenomenal
praise how I got a Sister who named her daughter Revolution
Black Woman praise you
how your heroes and saints speak to you from the edge of the world
how your ancestors tell you the mountaintop is near
how every step toward freedom
is emblazoned into your DNA
encoded in your retaliations of Black Joy
praise your Black Joy
praise your Black Joy

praise you Black Woman
because you never be praised enough
praise your hips
praise your thighs
praise your arms and your legs
praise your back and your heavy head
praise your neck and them tight-ass shoulders
praise your temples
and how your whole beautiful Black Woman body
is a Temple
praise you Black Temple
praise your knees and your elbows
your fingers and your toes
praise your perfect beautiful Black nose
and your perfect lips
praise your voice that sings and hums and hallelujahs
praise your voice that shouts for justice
that leads us all to shout beside you BLACK LIVES MATTER

Sister praise you
praise your heart for all that you bear
praise your ears for all that you hear
praise your eyes for all that you see
how your eyes and ears sometimes
bring you your biggest fears
and yet somehow somehow you soldier on
praise you Black Woman
I don’t know how you be so strong
I don’t know how you be so strong

this praise poem could just go on and on and on and on
because Sister—you never be praised enough

Kai Coggin (she/her) is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Mining for Stardust (FlowerSong Press 2021) and Incandescent (Sibling Rivalry Press 2019). She is: a queer woman of color who thinks Black Lives Matter, a teaching artist in poetry with the Arkansas Arts Council, and the host of the longest running consecutive weekly open mic series in the country—Wednesday Night Poetry. Recently awarded the 2021 Governor’s Arts Award and named “Best Poet in Arkansas” by the Arkansas Times, her fierce and powerful poetry has been nominated four times for The Pushcart Prize, as well as Bettering American Poetry 2015, and Best of the Net 2016 and 2018. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in POETRY, Cultural Weekly, SOLSTICE, Bellevue Literary Review, TAB, Entropy, SWWIM, Split This Rock, Lavender Review, Luna Luna, Blue Heron Review, Tupelo Press, West Trestle Review, and elsewhere. Coggin is Associate Editor at The Rise Up Review. She lives with her wife and their two adorable dogs in the valley of a small mountain in Hot Springs National Park, Arkansas.

Photo from the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibit via a Creative Commons License.

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Cell Block Tango

By Avra Margariti

A lullaby—seductive, hypnopaedic—slinks
through the high security ward
of the women’s prison.
Morrigan, the phantom queen

whistling between sharp teeth her very own
Cell Block Tango, banshee call
to arms. The doors all open wide

locks broken, passwords hacked, guard
uniforms painted red with life, never to
be washed clean again.

The inmates run, rubber soles over steel
and concrete, spilling through the courtyard
under the watchful eye of priestess Crow.
High on moonlight, bacchanal

the inmates dance like willow boughs
in the midst of a tornado.
They’ll drink the prison van’s gas for wine,
poison shared between thirsty lips,
cinereous uniforms set

on fire.

They’ll wear ferns for clothes,
or their skins
for clothes, or their bones—

their bones they will at last set free.

Avra Margariti is a queer author, Greek sea monster, and Pushcart-nominated poet with a fondness for the dark and the darling. Avra’s work haunts publications such as Vastarien, Asimov’s, Liminality, Arsenika, The Future Fire, Space and Time, Eye to the Telescope, and Glittership. The Saint of Witches, Avra’s debut collection of horror poetry, is forthcoming from Weasel Press. You can find Avra on twitter @avramargariti.

Photo by Chris via a Creative Commons license.

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

Gender Neutral

By Jane Muschenetz

To Skyler and the Diversionary Theatre, who stand proud and help all of us stand together.

They’re studying the effects of gendering on language
and cultural norms —
how the moon is feminine in Spanish and Russian,
but masculine in German
how this alters
our perception of its qualifications —
whether we believe it to be
beautiful, changeable (f) or
stoic, abrupt (m) —
over 1000 Google links discuss in length

how the moon is the moon.

Some promote doing away with sex, but I —
having learned gender from my Mother Tongue
and feeling its lack like a missing limb when I try bending English —
am fascinated, mouth hungry
to embrace each understanding of our world —
uncomfortable and broken as it is.
Learning to speak again and again,
there is something revealing
about seeing the moon
through every lexiconic, scientific, and artistic notion —
and still not having enough
words to fill the sky.

Emerging writer and fully grown MIT nerd, Jane (Yevgenia!) Muschenetz (Veitzman!) came to the US as a Jewish refugee from Ukraine at 10 years of age. She is now mother to two very American kids. Identity and cultural displacement strongly influence her writing. Creator of PalmFrondZoo.com, Jane’s work also appears or is forthcoming in Mom Egg Review, The San Diego Poetry Annual, and The Detour-Ahead Exhibit.

Photo by Debbie Hall.

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

Rudy Springs a Leak

By Suzanne O’Connell

This morning I found a meatloaf in a basket.
When you look, there are always things to find.
The only time you can find a fraudulent ballot
for example, is when you look.
We have statisticians willing to testify
that there is a big coordinated Thing.
It lurks in every city.
It’s chained to the rack of your public library
in the ‘F’ section, ‘F’ for fraud.
It sits on your front porch next to the Ficus.
It’s taken over Silicon Valley and CNN.
It’s a scientific fact.
Even Tanzania has rules about inspectors.
Everyone knows the smell of rotten meat, right?
How did the meatloaf get in there?
It’s logical to ask.
Voters could have been dead,
or voted 30 times, or for Mickey Mouse.
An extraordinary number of brave,
patriotic Americans came forward to witness.
Extraordinary!
I don’t have time to read you their affidavits,
I need to grab some lunch.
And I seem to have sprung a leak.
I thought I was waterproof.
My suit is starting to feel greasy,
like prison stew.
My ducts might also be full
as my oil gauge is blinking.
Anyway, trust me, the pattern repeats itself.
It’s only logical.

Poet’s note: This is a found poem from Rudy Giuliani’s speech at the Four Seasons Landscaping Store.

Suzanne O’Connell’s recently published work can be found in North American Review, Poet Lore, Paterson Literary Review, The Summerset Review, Good Works Review and Pudding Magazine. O’Connell was awarded second place in the Poetry Super Highway poetry contest, 2019. She was nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize. She received Honorable Mention in the Steve Kowit Poetry Prize, 2019. Her two poetry collections, A Prayer for Torn Stockings and What Luck, were published by Garden Oak Press.

Rudy Giuliani portrait and photograph by Dan Lacey, via a Creative Commons license. Purchase his art on Etsy.

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Farmers Market, Eastern Shore of Maryland

Summer 2021

By Erin Murphy

Everything is free, it seems: parking, treats for dogs
whose owners browse free-range brown

eggs. Last month scores of documents
were found in a nearby attic,

dry rotted and tattered. One offered
30 dollars for the capture of

a Negro man named Amos

with coarse trousers, a tolerable good
felt hat, buckled shoes, and scars

beneath both eyes. It’s not enough
that this street is now emblazoned

with the words Black Lives Matter.

Erin Murphy’s eighth book, Human Resources, is forthcoming from Salmon Poetry. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Normal School, Diode, Southern Poetry Review, The Georgia Review, Women’s Studies Quarterly, and elsewhere. Her awards include the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize, The Normal School Poetry Prize, and a Best of the Net award. She is poetry editor of The Summerset Review and Professor of English at Penn State Altoona. Visit website at www.erin-murphy.com.

Photo credit: Fibonacci Blue via a Creative Commons license.

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New Deal, No Mule

By Julie A Dickson

Cotton familiarity, certainly,
reparation absent, disparity
of races, apparent then, in lack
of mule plus 40 acres promised,
disconcerted, hired workers
of color, tried to transcend past
inequity, berated frequently,
repeatedly as subservient, un-
respected and mostly suspected
crime, intrusion, caucasian
collusion to diminish pride, worth
taken from generations passed,
freed at last, initial celebration,
only to face abrasive resentful
looks; reduced to history books,
lacking accurate depiction;
emancipation but cost high,
standing by fields, fruitful cotton
yield, in actuality, little more
than poverty revealed after 150
years freed, more than 50 since
King; other than fortunate few,
in contrast, bring home a living
inadequate, still cast in ill light;
not much has changed, reality
skewed, not equal exactly –
time to review, renew deal.

Julie A. Dickson is a poet and young adult fiction writer who addresses issues of environment, human and animal rights, and nature. Her work appears in journals including Ekphrastic Review, Sledgehammer, Open Word and Avocet. Dickson advocates for captive zoo and circus elephants and shares her home with two rescued feral cats, Cam and Claire. She is a Push Cart Prize nominee and serves on the board of the Poetry Society of New Hampshire. Her full length works are available on Amazon.

Photo credit: Tyler Merbler via a Creative Commons license.

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