Poetry – Page 7 – Writers Resist

GAZA

By Kiran Masroor

Gaza did not destruct for us to watch.
The way the word Gaza stays in the back of the throat.
I didn’t know I loved Gaza until it became so small.
Small as a word in a sentence. We fit such enormous things
into our mouths and expect that the meaning still comes through.
You cannot say a country’s name over and over until it is
reduced to the last bitter syllable. You cannot condense a million lives
and strain them and slice them and dice them and season them.
You cannot fit every angle into the words you say.
You cannot hold the beating love story of every citizen
and move the camera to their feet and catch
the smirk when they turn the alleyway onto the main road.
You cannot capture the slap of their soles
or the bend of their ankles as they run. If you could grab
a pitcher full of water but the pitcher was as big and impossible
as the moon and you poured it all onto the page until
the water became an ocean and the faces of every
loved thing resurfaced, maybe then
you could approach the entirety of things—
the young boy splashing his face with water,
standing beside the others as prayer begins,
thinking about the girl he loves,
and the girl in the waiting room of a clinic
tapping her foot against the floor,
and the wind outside, rearranging dust,
carrying footprints to sea.

Kiran Masroor is a rising junior at Yale University where she studies Neuroscience and Evolutionary Biology under the pre-medical track. On campus, she is involved in TEETH Slam Poetry, Timmy Global Health, and Yalies for Pakistan. Her poetry appears in such publications such as the New York Quarterly, the Connecticut Literary Anthology, and the Yale Global Health Review.

Photo credit: Peter Tkac 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.

Oath: n. curse, vow, promise.

By Lea Page

The photograph: Vice-President Kamala Harris (let’s just say that one more time: Vice-President Kamala Harris)—a woman, a brown woman, a black woman, an Asian-American woman, a woman born of immigrants, a powerful woman, a fierce woman, a joyful woman—swears in a man whose husband—partner, third-gentleman (?), the love of the man’s life, his staunchest supporter and best friend—holds the Bible on which he places his left hand before taking his oath of office. The book is small with a yellowed cover. Its pages appear tattered, maybe dog-eared, and all I can think is: That looks like my old Roget’s Thesaurus. I know the man is devoutly Christian in the old-time love-your-neighbor way, so I believe the book is an actual Bible (turns out, it’s his mother’s), but I wonder what it would mean to swear on a thesaurus, on a religion devoted to all the possibilities, to an expansion of definition, to inclusion and nuance. Think of paging through that holy book for a synonym for vice-president and finding: woman, brown woman, black woman, anyone, everyone, you, you, you.

Lea Page’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Washington Post, The Rumpus, Pinch, Stonecoast Journal, Pithead Chapel, High Desert Journal and Slipstream. She is also the author of Parenting in the Here and Now (Floris Books, 2015). She lives in rural Montana with her husband and a small circus of semi-domesticated animals.

Photo credit: The White House Flickr account.

Two Poems by Alice Rothchild

[fusion_builder_container hundred_percent=”no” hundred_percent_height=”no” hundred_percent_height_scroll=”no” hundred_percent_height_center_content=”yes” equal_height_columns=”no” menu_anchor=”” hide_on_mobile=”small-visibility,medium-visibility,large-visibility” class=”” id=”” background_color=”” background_image=”” background_position=”center center” background_repeat=”no-repeat” fade=”no” background_parallax=”none” enable_mobile=”no” parallax_speed=”0.3″ video_mp4=”” video_webm=”” video_ogv=”” video_url=”” video_aspect_ratio=”16:9″ video_loop=”yes” video_mute=”yes” video_preview_image=”” border_size=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” margin_top=”” margin_bottom=”” padding_top=”” padding_right=”” padding_bottom=”” padding_left=””][fusion_builder_row][fusion_builder_column type=”1_1″ layout=”1_1″ spacing=”” center_content=”no” link=”” target=”_self” min_height=”” hide_on_mobile=”small-visibility,medium-visibility,large-visibility” class=”” id=”” background_color=”” background_image=”” background_position=”left top” background_repeat=”no-repeat” hover_type=”none” border_size=”0″ border_color=”” border_style=”solid” border_position=”all” padding=”” dimension_margin=”” animation_type=”” animation_direction=”left” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_offset=”” last=”no”][fusion_text]

Thoughts on walking by rippling grey water under a darkened sky

In the days before stretch marks,
second husbands,
morning stiffness,
encore careers.
In the days when we couldn’t imagine
finding weed and condoms
secreted under our teenagers’ beds.
Or knowing the location of
every hidden bathroom in innumerable coffee shops,
Whole Foods,
Farmers’ Markets.

In the days when we wore clunky platform heels and
mini-skirts,
tossed a lion’s mane of crazy hair,
never worried about bunions,
hammer toes,
aching knees.

In those days,
poetry spilled from our guts,
orgasms came easy.
The spirit songs rooted
in our less encumbered selves,
wended their ways to our melodious, defiant tongues,
buoyed by a million women marching,
bearded men burning draft cards,
the fervent possibilities of youth.

Now, even in our graying successes,
we are weighted by the stones
of our disappointed mothers,
of bruises and torn ligaments accumulated
by stumbling through life.

Now, the future has creeping limits.
We’re stalked by the next mammogram,
unrelenting cough,
crushing brick on the chest.
Now, we have silver haired urgency
nipping at our toes.

This is an old fashioned
Call to action!
Take heart.
Wear purple.
Poke amongst old embers.
Your sisterhood will hold you.

When you are drowning,
we will throw you a life raft.
When you are gardening,
hand you a hoe.
If you fall into a hole,
we will haul down a ladder,
bad backs and all.

But when you are singing,
we will dance

Within reason.

The Right to Choose

December 30, 1994
Brookline, Massachusetts

On December 29,
twenty-two-year-old John Salvi,
thick black hair,
a wisp of a mustache,
eyebrows that knitted together
over the bridge of his nose,
drove to a hunting range
to practice his aim.

The following day,
less than two miles
from my home,
on a crisp, subzero morning,
forty pregnant girls and women,
partners, friends, mothers,
anxious, sad, frightened, resolved,
waited in a Planned Parenthood Clinic
for their turn.

Salvi strode into the clinic
carrying a black duffle bag.
If anyone had been watching,
they would have heard the quiet buzz
as he opened the zipper,
removed a modified .22 caliber Ruger 10/22 semi-automatic rifle.

He hit the medical assistant, Arjana Agrawal,
in the abdomen,
killed the receptionist, Shannon Lowney,
with a shot to her neck.

Screaming, blood,
a scramble for safety.
a shower of bullets,
five wounded.

He took his gun,
sprinted to his Audi,
drove west on Beacon Street
to Preterm Health Services,
two miles away.

Salvi strode into the clinic,
asked the receptionist, Lee Ann Nichols,
“Is this Preterm?”
Shot her point blank with a hunting rifle.
A security guard, Richard Seron,
returned fire.

Salvi dropped the duffle bag
containing receipts from a gun dealer
in Hampton, New Hampshire,
plus seven hundred rounds of ammunition and a gun.
He fled south to Norfolk, Virginia,
was captured after firing over a dozen bullets
into the Hillcrest Clinic.

The police arrived at Preterm
five minutes too late.

I trained before abortion was legal,
cared for women,
traumatized, mangled, infected,
by back-alley procedures.

I was an abortion provider
at the Women’s Community Health Center
and Beth Israel Hospital,
ten minutes from Planned Parenthood.

The next morning,
my eleven-year-old daughter
asked me, as I left for work,

“Mommy, are you going to die today?”

Alice Rothchild is a retired ob-gyn, author, and filmmaker who is writing a memoir in verse for young adults exploring her childhood in the 1950s and 60s and her development as a feminist physician and activist. Her poetry appeared in a collection of poems and essays titled Extraordinary Rendition: (American) Writers on Palestine. Her other published nonfiction books and contributions to anthologies, blogs, and webzines are listed on her website: alicerothchild.com. She is inspired by the unheard and the forgotten, the awakening of women’s voices and truth telling in the twenty-first century.

Photo credit: K-B Gressitt.

[/fusion_text][/fusion_builder_column][/fusion_builder_row][/fusion_builder_container]

Sip-In: 1966

By Jesse Mavro Diamond

For LGBT Rights Activist Dick Leitsch

Carpenters, bankers, bricklayers, undertakers.
Why gay bars?
Because we could only be gay
In gay bars.

The N.Y. State Liquor Authority CEO:
no discrimination in bars. Why?
because bars had the right to refuse customers
not acting suitably. Therefore, disorderly.

Bankers, bricklayers, undertakers, carpenters.
And Dick, a former Tiffany salesman
all risking entrapment because
wasn’t flirtation with a cute, undercover cop
worth the risk?

At the West Village bar,
John, Dick, Craig and Randy
dropped the “H” word bomb.
We are homosexuals and we want a drink.
Dick, Craig, John and Randy
I can’t serve you!
You’re not suitable! Therefore disorderly!

It’s true:
when a carpenter has sex with a banker
or a bricklayer has sex with an undertaker
or a John has sex with a Craig
or a Randy has sex with a Rick

being orderly is simply not suitable.

Jesse Mavro Diamond’s latest book of poetry, American Queers, will be published in 2022 by Cervena Barva Press. Her poetry has been published in many journals in The U.S. and Ireland. Her awards include first place in Eidos magazine’s international poetry competition for “A Very Sober Story,” the Tennessee Williams Literary Festival’s One of Ten Best Poems in the U.S. for “Swimming The Hellespont,” and “Chetwynd Morning,” chosen by Lascaux Review for its prize anthology. “An Elegy for Devron,” was musically scored by composer Mu Xuan Lu and premiered at Jordan Hall, Boston, in 2008. For many years, Mavro Diamond taught writing courses in Boston area colleges and high schools. She initiated and taught the first creative writing course Boston Latin School ever offered in its 386-year history.

Photo credit: USC Doheny Memorial Library.

My Black Ass Is Resting

By Sarah Sheppeck

“I want to hear all of you.”

“Do I have to tell it in order?”

“However you’d like.” She takes a cigarette, lights it, hands me the pack. “The only condition is that you have to tell it all.”

“Okay.” I exhale a thick plume of smoke. “All right. Here goes.”

•

It’s Saturday, so I wash and oil my hair. It’s spiritual, sensual, the way the curls alternately clutch my fingers and yield to their touch. I exit the washroom a goddess, the very image of Oshun. The white woman who lives here points at my head and asks me what happened, says she’s never understood African hair.

“At least,” she says proudly, “I have never felt inclined to touch it.”

•

The white man to my left at the bar asks if I’ve ever been with a white man. I drink my wine. He continues, “I was raised not to see color. I just see a soul.” I sip. Another Black woman enters and sits three stool down. He takes the empty one beside her.

The white man to my right says he’s not usually attracted to Black girls, but I am beautiful. “What are you mixed with?” he asks.

“Blood and skin,” I say.

He laughs, but, “No, really,” he says, “you look good in black. Actual Black people don’t look good in Black.” He continues, “Your nose isn’t wide like Other Black People’s.”

My wine ends up in his face. The bar kicks me out.

•

My first love has left me. My replacement is small and thin and blonde and very, very white. I comb through his email, look for clues that he still loves me. He has written her that he will never date a Black woman again. She replied, “She’s not even Black. She’s almost as white as me.”

I do not check his email again.

•

After my first rape, I go back to work. I am writing for a white woman, a memoir for which she will receive all the credit. She says something that reminds me of It, and I begin to weep. She insists I tell her everything, so I do. She lays her hand on my hair and tells me I am well spoken even in distress.

When the memoir is published, my story is a part of it, but now it is hers. She is a star now. She does interviews and tells the story of her tumult, tells of the pride she feels in the help she has been able to provide other survivors. She is rich. I have stopped writing.

•

I stub out my cigarette. I stare at her, expectantly I suppose, though I couldn’t say what it is I’m expecting.

“So that’s it,” I say. I look for something for my hands to do. Always aware, always in tune, she takes them.

“Oh, baby,” she says, motheringly, “Never give a white woman anything you aren’t prepared for them to steal. That includes your trauma.”

Sarah Sheppeck is a graduate of U.C. Riverside’s Palm Desert Low-Residency MFA program in Creative Writing and Writing for the Performing Arts. She earned her B.A. from the University of Rochester and her Master’s in Secondary Education from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Born and raised in upstate New York with stints in Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and the woods of northern Maine, she is now kicking it in Brooklyn with her beloved nephew and her dog, Chloe. Find her on Twitter @EpicSheppeck if you like thirst traps and loud opinions.

Photo by Daniele Fotia on Unsplash.

January 6th

By Sherry Stuart Berman

when they are ants
world is colony is home
is superorganism

single-file, no ears
they feel vibrations
with their feet
rely on scent
for instruction

they are trash-handlers,
excavators, swarm
when called to

and when their king
corrupts their wings
and rots the wood
and steals their eggs
they carry him
(they are very fine)

how grateful are they
how grateful are they
world is colony is home is white

Sherry Stuart Berman’s poems have appeared in Paterson Literary Review, Guesthouse, 2 Horatio, The Night Heron Barks, Atticus Review, Rise Up Review, and in the anthologies Malala: Poems for Malala Yousafzai and Drawn to Marvel: Poems from the Comic Books. She is a psychotherapist in private practice and lives in Staten Island, NY, with her husband and son.

Photo by Thomas Kinto on Unsplash.

In Praise of Boredom

By Suzanne O’Connell

The past four years have been like
having a dad who sells all the furniture
while I sleep,
breaks the windows over the sink,
throws out my stuffed bunny and lava lamp,
then promises to take me to the Ferris wheel.
He’s so loveable,
until he isn’t.
Like when he shoves me, yelling.
“Don’t bother me, wash those tears off your face.”

Later he bought me the gold lamé purse
that had tiny cells, making it collapse
like a golden puddle in my hands.
It had a handkerchief inside, lace
around the edges, ‘Thursday’
embroidered in pink on the front.

Thursday is the day the nice grownup
took the other one’s place,
stood with his hand on the Bible,
said, “My whole soul is in this.”
The grownup man has never lied to me
or sold our furniture
or broken my toys.
Not even one time.

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.

Photo by Agnieszka Kowalczyk on Unsplash .

the arrogance of illusion

by conney d. williams

the hope of this people,
like tectonics, quake
under the abusive weight
of impostors sitting
upon its collective breath
still engulfed in protest
dissenting to comply
with its own extinction
and these impostors
or parasites
would pillage
even the safety from victims
even as they
disintegrated in obscurity
human waste
inside foreign landfills
there is no mention
of memory
or ancestors
because super predators
eat the bone
suck the marrow
claiming copyright & discovery
over souls still starved
like refugees excommunicated
from access and accomplishment
this is the way of colonizers
and disease
never ask for introduction
infect every cell
with their own freedom
their own salvation
antidote and recovery
are not options
only the arrogance of illusion

Conney D. Williams is a poet, actor, community activist and performance artist with two collections of poetry. Leaves of Spilled Spirit from an Untamed Poet (2002) and Blues Red Soul Falsetto (2012); two critically acclaimed poetry CDs, River&Moan and Unsettled Water. His new collection, the distance of observation, will be released August 21, 2021 by World Stage Press.

Photo by Randy Jacob on Unsplash .

The Hold

By Pat Andrus

For Sandra Bland, Breonna Taylor, Michael Brown, George Floyd, seven-year-old Aiyana Mo’Nay Stanley-Jones, Eric Garner, Dante Parker, Atatiana Jefferson, ninety-two-year-old Kathryn Johnston . . .

A broken baton
a dead rat
5 jailers with guns.
How the life loses its state
of pure being.
How a bone breaks
and one rose falls.

I live in my own isolation
chosen, without blood
smeared on my dreams.
And the color of weak
is a white picket fence,
a story painted with
craven words
and a rule
of division and
unequal equations.
Can the body
find its healing laws?
Can a language
bandage the sores
of a society’s broken moons?

The colors of red
and brown
and yellow
make possible for mended wounds
if the dam finally breaks
and washers clean
the bottoms of
twisted stories and
fallen guns,
of cracked memories
trying to bandage
a lie in
the histories of the burning white suns.

Pat Andrus, having just completed her third work of poetry Fragments of the Universe (but right prior to the pandemic), has fully settled into her new home, San Diego, California. An instructor for several years at Bellevue College outside Seattle, Andrus also served two years as an artist-in-residence for the state of Washington. She also was fortunate to study modern dance with Seattle-based choreographers and with choreographer Debra Hay for a four-month residency. Today you can find Pat co-coordinating two monthly Poetic Legacy Workshops with Christophver R, sharing her works with San Diego State University MFAers at the Wine Lovers monthly, singing with her spiritual center’s choir, and giving support when financially possible to Voices of our City and Border Angels.

Photo by Oscar Helgstrand on Unsplash .

Stop Light

By D.A. Gray

“Embrace diversity.
Unite —
Or be divided,
robbed,
ruled,
killed
By those that see you as prey.
Embrace diversity
or be destroyed.”
― Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower

The light works for now.

We’re stopped at an intersection
beside the Walgreens and its half-full
parking lot, safely in our lanes,
east – west traffic moving steadily
across our path. The barber shop
across the street, quiet,
its door opening once in this minute
of stillness. No walls coming down
to separate us, just a belief in order
that’s still holding this moment
on the smooth black-topped road,
and the smooth skin of our cars
stays smooth because we believe
for now, that’s the way they should.

A shock jock is screaming over
the radio waves about givers and takers.

A truck races through a yellow light
with a confederate flag streaming.

So many would destroy this rather
than see it shared. I’ve deployed
to third world countries, aware
of how long it took to build this.
I’ve guarded voting lines, aware
of how hard to make sure
everyone knows this matters,

and guarded trucks so the road
crews could lay the asphalt.

I’ve come back knowing what we have
to lose – and it’s not enough when
we’re electing people who rise
to power just to watch it burn.

The light changes. We may move
forward, only if everyone on this road
notices the light and knows it means forward.

D.A. Gray is the author of Contested Terrain (FutureCycle Press, 2017) and Overwatch (Grey Sparrow Press, 2011). His poems have appeared in The Sewanee Review, Grey Sparrow Journal, Appalachian Review, Writers Resist, Comstock Review, Still: The Journal and Wrath-Bearing Tree among others. He holds Masters Degrees from The Sewanee School of Letters and Texas A&M-Central Texas. A veteran, Gray now teaches, writes, and lives in Central Texas.

Photo by wu yi on Unsplash.

Passing On Fire

By Joyce Frohn

My grandmother called herself a “tomboy.”
She bragged that she could chop wood and bale hay as fast
as the men.
And then they sat down and read the paper while she baked
fine biscuits and pie.
She loved hunting, motorcycles and gardening.
She raised four children in a boxcar,
teaching the boys to cook and the girls to love learning.
and that dairy farm sent four children to college.

Her daughters called themselves “new women” and “liberated.”
They marched in protests, fought discrimination on the job and
balanced motherhood and jobs.
They aimed for medical school and seminary.
They fought for their children,
you win some, you lose some.

I call myself a “feminist.”
College was assumed.
I love poetry, slime molds and frog cells.
I signed petitions as soon as I could write.
Some days old battles stay on and
sometimes new problems arise.

We’ve fought for so long.
What will my daughter call herself?
Will she be the one to say “woman”?
What battles will she fight?
Her great grandmother holds her small soft hand
in a stiff callused one and passes on the fire.

Joyce Frohn has been published in Nothing Ever Happens in Fox Hollow, Strange Stories, and Page & Spine, among other places. She is married with a teen-aged daughter. She also shares a house with two cats, a lizard and too many dust bunnies.

Election Day

By Elizabeth Edelglass

We stand in line beside our mothers’ stockinged legs, line snaking through the gymnasium, where yesterday we’d also snaked through same gymnasium, mouths agape for the healing cube, sugar our mothers said, but bitter, live virus, our parents had said, to save us from the deadly virus, their voices husky with fear, when they thought we couldn’t hear from our secret perch on the upstairs landing, aliens landed from our beds in the sky. Now our mothers lift us high with strong arms, purposeful fingers, click the levers, pull the arm, part the curtain, we the people whisper our secret choices. Then home to our fathers in their fatigues from the war, fathers who’d already voted, forsaking sleeping houses at sunup, as always, though no work today, so rake the leaves, let us jump the piles, crisp and sharp, then watch our fathers set the piles aflame, red and orange and crunchy brown, smoke soaring to the sky.

We stand in line in our fathers’ fatigues from the war, line snaking through the gymnasium, where yesterday we square-danced, dosido, allemande left, allemande right, line snaking, choose your partner, change your partner, kiss your partner behind the bleachers. Old enough now to snake on our bellies through Asian jungle, if we were boys, old enough to click the levers, pull the arm, part the curtain, assert our choice to save the boys we think we love from snaking through the jungle mud. Then home to huddle in those boys’ strong arms under percale piles, to scream and husky cry, election stolen by dirty tricks, as bombs keep crying from the sky, until at last those tricky fingers flash the famous V before boarding a chopper to fly out of sight, rotors roaring into the sky.

We stand in line with our kangaroo pouches, babies snuggled at our breasts, toddlers at our denimed legs, line snaking through the gymnasium, where yesterday we were chosen, or not chosen, for the team. Line snaking through the gymnasium where soon our babies will be chosen, or not chosen, we pray for them as we click the levers, pull the arm, part the curtain, affirm our choices, big and small, win or lose, year after year, school board, zoning board, firemen’s budget. Then home to rake the leaves, we let our children jump in the piles, when they think we cannot see, freely fly across grass and sky, then rake again, into bio-safe bags, saving the smoke, restoring the sky.

We stand in line in our pantsuits and pearls, behind our masks, line snaking outside the gymnasium, six-foot circles on grass as green as far-off jungle, leaves painting rainbow sky, sun shining as if God knows, line snaking one-by-one, dosido into the gymnasium, where tomorrow our grandchildren will all be chosen, everyone a winner now, though they know truths we think they don’t. Yesterday we helped our mothers, safe on Facetime, mark their ballots with brittle fingers, will they touch us once again before they soar to unknown sky? We’re determined to stand in line, though old enough to be at risk, we shout our choice to save the world from sneaky virus, snake-y words, both sharp with spikes that can kill. We mark our ballots with gloved fingers, slide into scanners, what happens next we do not know, missing the click of levers, the pull of arm, the reassuring slide of curtain. Then home to rake the leaves with bony fingers, aching arms, anything to avoid the blaring TV voices, we lift our eyes, imploring the sky.

Elizabeth Edelglass is a fiction writer and book reviewer who finds herself writing poetry in response to today’s world—personal, national, and global. Her first published poems recently appeared in Global Poemic and Trouvaille Review. Her story “An Implausibility of Wildebeests” appeared in Writers Resist in November 2020. Follow her on Facebook and Twitter.

Photo by Patrick Schöpflin on Unsplash.

Work

By Mary Leary

Please stop writing about nothing. The light from your
lawn chairs. Berries you savored or didn’t,
bodies massed for gatherings on back summer lawns. Nice usually means
smiling; at least pretending to listen. Maybe keeping it light.
No politics at New Year’s Day dinner, you say and I
wonder why I came
when we are in a process of
disintegration; the only news left to report, my lonely
heartbroken calling
for birds, sea creatures, coral
in the poems I don’t write
for people in straits too dire for them to notice silenced
chirps; scattered winds anxious
for the sounds they used to make through
trees, now downed and drowned.

The poems I won’t write, for people too busy
trying to pull women and children
from bloody, uncaring jaws;
people who never recovered from
the famine/flood/fire/murder; several hammers
to the head of New Orleans. Creatures/women/children/prisoners
who’ve stopped waiting for someone
to help them. I am much closer to the waves
of destruction than those who have time
to write about tea with the lonely cat,
reunions hinting at the last gasps of
something some called civilization. That’s the triumph,
you will say — capturing those
small moments in the lap of the relatively
or greatly sheltered classes. You are probably right.
Once we meet, I do
want to know about your life. For now
I need to bear witness to oily death rattles.
Last gasps.

Mary Leary has been writing since she was about eight. She would prefer to have been born a banker.

Photo credit: K-B Gressitt.

We Must Resist

By Laura Martinez

Everything has changed

Nothing has changed

He is gone

Does that mean we no longer resist?

It “takes time” to undo what he has done

Does that mean we no longer resist?

As long as elected officials state “America is not a racist country”

We must resist

As long as there is voter suppression

We must resist

As long as my grandson lives in fear of driving while black

We must resist

As long as women and LGBTQ communities risk losing everything they have gained

We must resist

As long as those fleeing oppression and poverty are turned away at the Southern border

We must resist

As long as elected officials live in fear of he who is not really gone

We must resist.

As long as fear and conspiracy theories abound

We must resist.

No matter who is in the White House

WE MUST RESIST

Laura Martinez is a retired social worker. She has been involved in active resistance for more than fifty years and knows we must resist injustice no matter who is in the White House.

Paean to All the Books I’m Reading in the Time of COVID

and Black Lives Matter

By Patricia Aya Williams

From the un-masked and (turtled

nooks) of home to the socially – distanced

and sanitized

patios

of coffeeshops,

I greet you.

The world spins

on an axis

of livid proclaiming

and

bulleted majesty

while vultures circle the fetid plain.

It is a summer of fires and

burning,

convulsions of voices

from frac- tured streets.

Still in quiet hours,

there is joy …

I invite you,

keepers of slow wisdom, speak –

your history,

your poetry,

your lives no longer but for ink and thought –

let us reckon together a truth

unshallowed

an air

that will let us all

breathe

Patricia Aya Williams is currently enrolled in the San Diego Writers, Ink Poetry Certificate Program. She is also an award-winning iPhone/iPad digital artist who takes great delight in her scarf collection. Her poems have been published in San Diego Poetry Annual and City Works Literary Journal.

Photo by Daniel Páscoa on Unsplash.

I can’t breathe

By Mary F. Lenox

I can’t breathe
the words said
written on a waste container
near the sidewalk

I wondered what other
unheard voices say
I can’t breathe

Dying fish of the sea
echo
I can’t breathe
as they
navigate through
plastic and oil invaders

Birds
call out
through polluted air
I can’t breathe

Children playing
in urban streets
for lack of space elsewhere
I can’t breathe

Rivers and streams
full of sewage from earthlings
scream
I can’t breathe

Shouting voices of people of color
grieving for relief
from all the ways oppressors
have tried to kill, destroy, eliminate
I can’t breathe

Yet
young and old around the world march and proclaim
No more!

We will not stand silently by
hearing those words
I can’t breathe

Born in Chicago, Illinois, Mary F. Lenox is a poet, writer, speaker, and educator. She was a professor at the University of Missouri-Columbia in the School of Library and Information Science where she served as dean for 12 years. She is the author of two books of poetry, Threads of Grace: Selected Poems (2015) and Riches of Life: Poems (2019). She resides in San Diego, California.

Photo credit: Tyler Merbler via a Creative Commons license.

Dead Man Votes in Wayne County, Michigan

By William Palmer

I found an old mask on the ground
and stood in line.

At a table I handed a woman a scrap
of paper with my name on it
and my old address. She scrunched
her face to check it while a big guy
behind her wearing a white mask
with red and blue firearms on it
told her to keep the line moving.
She looked at my old Ford Assembly Plant ID
and the guy told her again but louder.
She handed me a ballot.
I voted for Joe Biden.

I signed my name best I could
then walked out
before my legs caved to dust.

William Palmer’s poetry has appeared in J Journal, Poetry East, and Salamander. He has published two chapbooks—A String of Blue Lights and Humble—and has been interviewed by Grace Cavalieri for The Poet and the Poem from the Library of Congress. He lives in northern Michigan.

Photo by Josh Carter on Unsplash.

My body belongs to me

By Claire Sexton

It’s an insight the menopause has gifted to me.
The knowledge that my body belongs
wholly to me.
At last I can own my own body.
At last I don’t need to parade for boys or girls.
I can walk around my flat freely.
I can look in the mirror without flinching.
I can accept that my body has ‘curves.’
Like duck eggs, or cat tails, or a funerary cartouche.
Yes. My body belongs to me. That is final.
My flesh has come into the fold.
Where it is warm and sheltered from neglect.
Its creases are unique and compiled by me.
There are scriptures upon its expanse.
It has become my family at last.

Claire Sexton is an autistic woman who writes poetry that deals with neurodiverse and other mental health issues. She lives and works in England and is a medical librarian. She has previously been published in magazines such as Amethyst Review, Ink, Sweat and Tears, Light: a journal of photography and poetry, and Anti Heroin Chic.

Photo by Aleksander Vlad on Unsplash.

1962

By Ruth Hoberman

Memorial Day, we wore white gloves
to hold the flag. Songs fluttered in our lungs
like helium: we were pilgrim and witch,
Crockett and Quaker, the slave, the raft, the shore.

We were eleven, rich in Sousaphones and common wealth,
so sure of where the river went,
we’d beg our teachers to run our movies backwards,
hooting when the aphid spat back the eaten leaf

and the scientist, stripped of his white coat by the past,
hurried back to bed, the world unlearning itself.
Less funny now the Civil War’s unfought, and dinosaurs
return, and kids in cages bawl for their parents

while some guy in a uniform sends them back
and back and back. I was so sure America moved—
like tunnels, time, and rivers—toward the light.

Ruth Hoberman is a writer living in Chicago but residing in New Haven, Connecticut to be near her daughter and her family during the pandemic. Her poems have appeared in such journals as Smartish Pace, Rhino, Calyx, Adirondack Poetry Review, and Spoon River Poetry Review and her essays in Michigan Quarterly Review, Consequence, and The Examined Life. She is a professor emerita of English at Eastern Illinois University, where she taught for thirty years, specializing in modern British literature.

Photo credit: Khairil Zhafri via a Creative Commons license.

Anger Management in a Time of COVID-19 Pandemic and Riotous Grief

By Ron L. Dowell

First, understand what you call a riot
was the Watts rebellion ending our 1965
Little League season. No last inning strikeout,
but choking smoke, thick of burning rubber,
no walk-off homerun, but smoldering wood,
no game-winning catch, but chemicals scorching
our throats, chest, lungs, interrupting me & Gerald’s
sunrise to sundown baseball passion on Gopher
Hole Stadium, redlined with public dollars. No,

never a riot, senseless, though it shines so.
CHP/LAPD, Marquette Frye, blood-wild, illogical emotion.
But rebellions always protest convention,
give sound to silence, fires cold dark places,
matter to people ignored, who attend unlettered schools,
& suffer grinding inequity from skin-color separation.
Baseball galvanized & helped equalize the offsets.

Sequestered atop our diamond-patterned chainlink
backstop, the fire surrounding us moved quickly,
scattered pigeons, our world burned in a square
circle like bases around our public housing
perimeter, eyes red, local stores convulsing
fire; Country Farms, Sav-on, Shop Rite, Safeway.
An uprising? Maybe—but never a riot,
& shaking, we scrambled, gasping. We played catch.

Jurist acquit Stacy Koon & Laurence Powell
that spring 1992 for clubbing shitless
Rodney “Can we get along?” King. How bad do you
jack a neighborhood before the hood
says enough? Many times the bucket visits the well,
one day the bucket bottom falls out. No, no riot.
After mad men smash Reginald Denny’s skull with bricks,
& four Good Samaritans help his distress,
the Little League board postpones practice that day & forever.

Choking smoke, thick of burning rubber, chemicals
& smoldering wood seeps inside our tiny Watts
home searing throats, chest, lungs.
Why can’t we play, daddy?
my three children ask while watching on TV
their favorite Jack in the Box burn, an hysterical
newsman calling it a riot as if it’s reasonless,
Why do they burn their stores? Why?
says he, ducking under an Olde English 800 billboard,
behind him, a looter wheels from the drugstore’s ash
his shopping cart, Huggies, Seagrams overloaded.
A young boy helps his father loot the sporting goods,
them taking a thermos & two Thigh-Masters, the
scene shifts to an earlier footage, stores like Empire
Liquor, which murdered Latasha Harlins

over orange juice & Tom’s Liquor aflame, a woman,
plastic bags laden with canned food & toilet
paper. Club Reno, an auto parts store ablaze,
armed sheriff’s deputies hiss over peoples of
color prone on their bellies, hands hogtied behind
their backs, cartons of Marlboros cast about the

asphalt before them. My daughter’s hand sweeps
her forehead, ridding herself of sweat. She flinches
at the pop outdoors, her brother snuggles against
my bosom, the other one hides behind the door.
Sirens scream, helicopters swoop; we’ve no firewall.
Stiffly, we resign to our back yard & play catch.

III

My morning kitchen is cold. I use stove burners
to warm, recalling how my mother often left
them on, sometimes the oven door open. Now I
understand, in life’s sunset, that that was one-way
poor people warmed their apartments. Public housing
room heaters were inefficient. I never felt

cold in our flat-roofed two-bedroom fourplex rental.
It’s been nearly 30 years since the last Los Angeles
riot & those experiences are etched,
carved into my mind like the confederate bas
relief of Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee
& Stonewall Jackson on Georgia’s Stone Mountain

whose ghost’s lives in habits of white nativism,
over-policing, homelessness, immigrant camps, lives’
sidelined, precursors to when George Floyd can’t breathe,
calls his mother with his last breath &
once again, we’ll choke in smoke, thickened by burning
rubber, chemicals, smoldering wood, scorching our
throats, chests, lungs. Take me to the ballgame,
find someone to play catch with me.

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 short stories have appeared in Oyster Rivers Pages, Moon Magazine, Unlikely Stories, Smoky Blue Literary and Arts Magazine #11, Watermelanian Magazine, The Fear of Monkeys, Writers Resist, Baby Boomers Plus 2018, and The Bombay Review. His poetry resides in Penumbra and The Poeming Pigeon. He’s a 2018 PEN America Emerging Voices Fellow. For more about Ron, please visit his website: crookedoutofcompton.com.

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash.