Poetry – Page 6 – Writers Resist

Love Songs for End Times

By Zoë Fay-Stindt

I sing to
the green anole
in a made-up
lizard language—
fiddling tongue,
whirlwinds
and whistle-
clucks.
He curves his neck,
ear hole craned
to my porch perch.
He pinks
his bubble-throat.
For years, I saw
devil horns peeking
from each human
head. Yes,
the chemical,
the highway framed
with fields
and fields
of low metal
chicken farms,
bouncing off death
in the sun. Yes,
the river
nearly evaporated.
But on all those
superfund sites,
someone—
no, a people
—are planting
black ash trees.
Sweetgrass
grows thicker
from our harvesting
hands. Reader,
it’s not all gone up
in flames.
I say this
for you
and for me.
On a postcard
taped to my wall,
a globe as deep
pink as the lizard’s
puffed throat:
le soleil
ne se couche pas.
And it’s true:
the sun never sets.

Zoë Fay-Stindt (she/Z/they) is a queer, bicontinental poet with roots in both the French and American South. Their work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, featured or forthcoming in places such as RHINO, Muzzle, and Ninth Letter, and gathered into a chapbook, Bird Body, winner of Cordella Press’ inaugural Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize. She lives in Ames, Iowa, where she is an MFA candidate at Iowa State University, award-winning teacher, and co-managing editor for the environmental writing journal, Flyway.

Photo credit: Green anole image by Matthew Paulson via a Creative Commons license.

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Predators

By Laura Grace Weldon

If a grizzly wanders into your social media
don’t make eye contact or sudden moves.
Abandon the sandwich you were eating, leave
the small square of chocolate you saved for last.

Sharks often appear in parking garages
silent, stealthy, even as you confine
your blood’s scent under a coat pulled tight,
hurry your steps, summon your car’s refuge.

You’re warned away from boa constrictors
although their natural habitat is your manager’s office,
the statehouse, every tightly coiled corporation
crushing you bit by bit.

Predators often smile, extend a hand, act polite.
Beware, the trap may be ready to snap.
Expect the hurt, the trick, the vicious threat,
the unholy fury when you try to walk away.

Laura Grace Weldon served as Ohio’s 2019 Poet of the Year and is the author of four books. She works as a book editor, teaches writing workshops, and maxes out her library card each week. Connect with her at lauragraceweldon.com.

Illustration credit: 1906 illustration of a corporate predator from Arena Magazine, Volume 35, in the public domain.

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Velocity Squared

By Flavian Mark Lupinetti

when the gun smoke clears
and the EMTs bring the bodies to my ER
and I ask why they bothered and they say
we need someone to pronounce them most
times I say you pronounced them just fine
but today I can’t bear to make that joke
because these aren’t so much bodies as
they are chunks of protoplasm subordinated
to the law of physics that dictates force
equals mass over two times velocity squared

when the gun smoke clears
I reflect how clever of Eugene Stoner
who shrewdly designed his AR-15
to fire rounds of a petite .223 caliber
but to propel them at 3200 feet per
second because how else to
penetrate steel plate at 500 yards or
disarticulate a leg from the pelvis
with a flesh wound below the knee
unless you rely on velocity squared

when the gun smoke clears
it still amazes me that these
headless corpses and these
exploded chests each resulted
from a single shot yet it makes
perfect sense mathematically
if you want to create an exit wound
the size of an orange with a bullet
smaller than your Bic pen
you need that velocity squared

Flavian Mark Lupinetti, a poet, fiction writer, and cardiac surgeon, received his MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. His work has appeared in About Place, Barrelhouse, Bellevue Literary Review, Briar Cliff Review, Cutthroat, Sport Literate, and ZYZZYVA. Mark lives in New Mexico.

Image credit: Jasper Nance via a Creative Commons license.

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Oratorio of Arrival

By Dia Calhoun

for Ukraine, 2022

Because the woman hugs a green glass bottle
yellow-wicked, and waits
by the fabric store where she once bought
the blue wool for her coat,
the scarlet gingham for the kitchen window,
coral flannel to snuggle her baby
somewhere now on the pouring road to Poland—

Veni Magna Spirita

Because the composer holds his index finger,
limber from years of black piano keys,
on the trigger of an AK-47,
a melody in B minor playing in his head—

Veni Magna Spirita

Because the music is louder, the blue brighter
than the tanks now grinding down the street—

Veni Magna Spirita

Because their eyes meet
because she lights the torch
because he pulls the trigger
singing his greatest opus—Fuck you, bastard!
because she runs out, blue coat whirling,
and throws—

Veni Magna Spirita

Crossing a different border, their baby looks up.

Dia Calhoun is the author of seven young adult novels, including two verse novels, After the River the Sun and Eva of the Farm (Atheneum, 2013, 2012). She won the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Children’s Literature. Her poems have appeared in The EcoTheo Review and MORIA Literary Magazine. An article on poetry craft, co-authored with Deborah Bacharach, is forthcoming in the Writer’s Chronicle. Calhoun is a co-founder of readergirlz, recipient of The National Book Foundation Innovations in Reading Prize. She has taught at Seattle University, Stony Brook University, and The Cornish College. Learn more at diacalhoun.com.

Image credits: The compilation is by our own Debbie Hall, poetry editor and author, and the flag image is by Nataliya Smirnova on Unsplash.

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Tribute

By Eric Abalajon

My coffee tries to push back the basement chill
crawling up my legs, as I read a friend’s message.
I want to describe to you my table, Mayamor.

I remember your poem where you simply
list the towns won over by,
and sustaining, the movement.

It was, however, a security issue to publish it
in any mainstream venue, even a college folio
as it could be used as a blueprint for retaliation.

Safe to assume in this protracted fight,
our enemies read our poems as well.
The piece is an interesting rejoinder to
the image of a subversive poet, one not writing
witty metaphors against tyrants
but labors in naming of an emerging realm.

I would like to imagine, it was drafted
in folded cigarette packs during breaks
from long treks where you were
embracing fauna, seldom
acknowledged allies to armed encounters.

Another thorn of living in the
other side of the world is
the unease waking up to tributes for you.

Evenings is when we grieve our martyrs,
but I get to feel your weight of your life
on my chest, like Mount Napulak, in broad daylight.

Eric Abalajon is currently a lecturer at the University of the Philippines Visayas, Iloilo. His works have appeared in Ani, Katitikan: Literary Journal of the Philippine South, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, The Tiger Moth Review, and elsewhere. Recently his poems are included in the collections Sobbing in Seafood City (Sampaguita Press, 2022) and Footprints: An Anthology of New Ecopoetry (Broken Sleep Books, 2022). He lives near Iloilo City. You can find him on Twitter @JLaneria and on Instagram @jacob_laneria.

Image credit: “Cemetery of San Joaquin,” Iloilo, Philippines, by EdseastresD600, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

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Secrets in the Gazebo

By Penny Perry

For my Aunt Leona Heyert Tarleton
who died at age 33

We are looking at the mockingbird
in the lemon tree. This is the first day
of my cousin’s summer visit.
I wriggle closer to her.
“I know how my mother died,”
my cousin whispers.
The gazebo is the place for secrets.

My Aunt Leona was almost famous.
She wrote plays that were on Broadway,
did crossword puzzles in ink. On a cold
spring day when silly girls wore sundresses
and shivered, Aunt Leona wore a smart
wool suit and pinned a spring violet
on her lapel.

Wendy’s mother died when Wendy
was only seven months old.

My cousin squints at the sun shooting
off the adobe tile roof. This is the first day
of her summer visit.
The jasmine smells sweet. She is thirteen.
I am eleven.

“She had an abortion,” Wendy says.
Her eyes are bright. She loves telling me
things I’m not supposed to know.

“A-bor-tion,” I repeat. Grandpa taught us
to sound out long words.

Grandma calls my cousin an orphan
even though she has a father.
“My mother didn’t want to have a second
baby so soon.”
“A baby?”
“It wasn’t a baby.
Your mother drove her to the bad doctor.”

“She wouldn’t do that.”
“But she did.”
I blot my wet face with my sleeve.
The excitement has left my cousin’s eyes.

Now I know why sometimes Mother
locks the bathroom door, turns the water
on full blast. She thinks I don’t hear her cries.

Wendy has long legs and her feet
touch the ground. My legs dangle
and the tie on the right sneaker has come
undone.

A seven time Pushcart nominee, Penny Perry has published a poetry collection, Santa Monica Disposal and Salvage (Garden Oak Press). Her novel Selling Pencils and Charlie, also from Garden Oak Press, was a finalist in the San Diego Book Awards in 2021. Her new poetry collection, Woman with Newspaper Shoes, was published June 2022 by Garden Oak Press.

Photo credit: “Polite Notice on Studded Door” is by Morning-meadow Jones, an American junior high school dropout, who later went on to realize her full potential and drop out of college too. She is a mother, migrant, and multi-media creative, practicing all manner of arts from her home in Wales, UK. She recently launched her writing career at the age of 51. Foolow her on Twitter at @Morning_meadowJ.

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Feeding the Goldfish

By René Marzuk

We walk to the edge of the pond at the far end
of the backyard—a pond dirty and small, slightly bigger
than a bathtub—filled with plants and fish carefully chosen
for their ability to survive off each other. “An ecosystem,”
you offer.

A grubby Eden. Colored shapes appear
and disappear within the murky waters, like spilled glass
marbles or ghosts drawn in sfumato, dodging our gifts.

Each crumb is an excess to be pondered. Kindness,
many a time, finds its way into a contract.
“How much, just how much exactly,
will this miracle cost us?”

René Marzuk is a poetry and prose editor at Writers Resist.

After completing a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Rene is on the path to finish his English MA at the same institution and is already considering his next steps. Accidentally born in Ukraine to Cuban parents, he grew up in Havana, Cuba, and migrated to the United States as an adult.

He is currently a contributing editor of The Envious Lobster, a collection of nineteenth-century American children’s nature writing, where he focuses on rescuing the works of non-white and child authors. Overall, his research interests include Modern American literature and literary-cultural intertextuality, children’s literature, cultural studies, semiotics, code-switching practices, and articulation of marginal identities in literary works, among others.

Both inside and outside of academia, Rene has worn and continues to wear many hats. As of right now, he writes poetry, runs, takes pictures, and dabbles in drawing and illustration. He lives in High Point, North Carolina.

Photo credit: Image by Matt Artz on Unsplash.

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Slave Cemetery

By Elizabeth Spencer Spragins

anguish overflows
levees lined with unbleached bones—
a channeled fury
gathers silt of centuries
and the river roars their names

Elizabeth Spencer Spragins is a fiber artist, writer, and poet who taught in North Carolina community colleges for more than a decade before returning to her home state of Virginia. Her work has appeared in 80-plus journals and anthologies in 11 countries. She is the author of three original poetry collections: Waltzing with Water and With No Bridle for the Breeze (Shanti Arts Publishing) and The Language of Bones (Kelsay Books). Visit her website.

Photograph by Gregory Monk via a Creative Commons license.

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Body Before Extinction

By Emily Hockaday

I sing to the water and lower my only child
into the foam, wiggling toes first. I think about
all the species the ocean held
that I don’t know the names of
that have gone extinct this past year
and focus on the sound of the waves
and all the metaphors
that the tide could cover.

I have walked this beach
and pulled balloons, broken bottles,
cracked plastic, and wristwatches
from the surf and dunes
without seeing another person
for miles. I listen for the wind
through the beach grass and
the plover and seagulls
and hand my daughter a trash bag
and gloves. I don’t even know how many
animals are left. I am afraid
to look for the answer.

Emily Hockaday’s first full-length collection Naming the Ghost is out with Cornerstone Press November 2022. She is the author of five prior chapbooks, most recently Beach Vocabulary from Red Bird Chaps. Her work has appeared in print and online journals, as well as the Wayfinding, Poets of Queens, and In Isolation anthologies. She can be found on the web at www.emilyhockaday.com and on Twitter @E_Hockaday.

Photograph by Aryeh Alex via a Creative Commons license.

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Throwaway

By Karen Kilcup

Who would want to live in a world which is just not quite fatal? –Rachel Carson

A one-woman Revolution,
Jemima Wilkinson was stoned
for preaching the light that lives
in everyone. The Public Universal Friend
was driven north from Philadelphia
to the Finger Lakes, her movement forecasting
what would follow: women’s rights,
abolition, the Underground Railroad.

Today the monstrous trucks lumber north
with New York City’s trash, creating
a mountain baptized Seneca Meadows,
leaving a trail of sludge and garbage that leaches
slowly into the lakes, their stretched-out
digits trying to grasp what it all means,
will mean, in a moment when land and water
and history are for sale by the Town Council,
which spews the gospel of lower taxes
and buries ever deeper the women
of Seneca Falls, Seneca Lake,
and the sparkling railroad that carried
so many to fresh futures.

In this place, this time, what does clean mean?
What—or who—is dirty? Will we push
the plastic and the people underground
for good, or will the glacial hands
that hold the Haudenosaunee
send the refuse down, down,
until it returns elsewhere
in poisoned protest?

Poet’s note: A Quaker known by many as the Public Universal Friend, Jemima Wilkinson fled the ostensibly liberal city of Philadelphia shortly after the American Revolution, joined by devout followers who saw her as a spiritual guide. Susan Brind Morrow’s story in The Nation, “The Finger Lakes Are Being Poisoned,” ironically parallels Wilkinson’s flight to the appalling movement of diesel trucks that carry New York’s waste to the formerly pristine region that is home to centuries of Iroquois (Haudenosaunee) people, as well as to some of America’s most important movements for social justice advanced by Native Americans, women, and enslaved people—all historically considered subhuman and “dirty.”

A teacher and writer for more than forty years, Karen Kilcup is the Elizabeth Rosenthal Professor of American Literature, Environmental & Sustainability Studies, and Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies at UNC Greensboro. She feels fortunate to work with many students of color, first-generation students, and LGBTQI+ students at this Minority-Serving Institution. Their courage and imagination inspire her and give her hope. Her forthcoming book, winner of the 2021 Winter Goose Poetry Prize, is titled The Art of Restoration.

Photograph by OwlPacino via a Creative Commons license.

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What I Learn

By Lorna Rose

I listen to the sweaty silence,
his throbbing presence as he stares at
my developing chest.

I learn to calculate the tides.
Learn his breath smells like mints when he’s offering me up.
Men’s gazes have teeth.

Pivot and scan for the response he wants
at the appropriate time.
You’re pretty. Perform for me.

Legs and boobs get you far. They open doors
to bedrooms
where all good girls go.

Learn to hide and calculate the tides.
Aren’t you proud you made your father happy?

Lorna Rose is a Pacific Northwest writer and speaker. Her narrative nonfiction and poetry have been recognized by Pacific Northwest Writers Association and the Oregon Poetry Association, and have appeared in About Place Journal, Third Wednesday, Jellyfish Review, Scary Mommy, and elsewhere. Lorna also speaks publicly on motherhood, finding resilience through writing, and her experience in AmeriCorps. She is at work on a memoir about going from LA party girl to trail worker in rural Alaska. For more, visit Lorna’s website.

Photograph by That guy names Jere via a Creative Commons license.

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Everyone Tells Me

By Alma A.

Everyone tells me
It wasn’t my fault,
That karma will get him,
Will leave him to rot.

Everyone tells me
I should have fought harder,
And why did I wear that,
I was asking for trouble.

Everyone tells me,
That ‘no’ isn’t binding,
It’s fluid, it’s blurred,
I am overreacting.

Filthy, contaminated,
Shameful, guilt-ridden.
I could have stopped him,
A dim future, unwritten.

Everyone tells me,
That I’m not okay,
But maybe I will be,
Maybe someday.

When hell freezes over,
And rapists stop raping,
Only there might I get
My chance at escaping.

But when my words reach no ears,
And the fighting ceases,
I’m the one who will be there
To pick up the pieces.

Alma A. is originally from Boston, and now resides in Canada with her cat and dog. She is a student with a passion for writing, and she aspires to do it on a professional level. She mostly writes science fiction in her spare time and sells her crafts on the side.

Photograph by Jane Fox via a Creative Commons license.

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Fury

By Skye Wilson

I want to break his bones for what he did.
No metaphors, just snap against my skin;
pain blooming in his eyes like burns on flesh.
I’ll scorch all of the skin he touched me with.

I want to grow to twice my usual size,
drink in the pain and terror in his eyes,
feel the power as I tower in starlight,
inhale the fear he sensed on me that night.

Tell Salome the Baptist’s head won’t do,
I take more than half a kingdom to subdue:
I need rivers of the blood of all the men
who kill their lovers and who hurt my friends.
Give me the lives and wives they don’t deserve.
Give me a platter: on it, place the world.

Skye Wilson is a bisexual Scottish writer, living in Newcastle. She has an MSc in creative writing from the University of Edinburgh. Her work is preoccupied with the body and belonging. Find her words at skye-wilson.com or on Twitter @skyegwilson.

Image by Sharon Brogan via a Creative Commons license.

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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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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.

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.

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.