Poetry – Page 8 – Writers Resist

Duende and The Great Matter of Life-and-Death

By Karen Morris

Garcia Lorca called me last night (Before you get in a twist, he called you too.
You didn’t pick up.) He said, “Disappearance and Death are real.” I suggested he text
but, texting’s too flat for the poetics of death. “Sure,” you said to no one
out loud, ridding yourself of the bitter taste on your tongue.

I feel you quicken, slow drifting away. Turning the trail by checking the volume,
counting the likes, followers, following. Disappearance after disappearance. There’s no
way to count the air. You think you know death. The Day of the Dead is just
ink. Garcia Lorca called you last night. Your line was dead.

Playing at death in the House of Numb.
Ay! Valiant cruising Internet!
Ay! Needles nattering!

Garcia Lorca is calling from Portland. Pick up!
Pick up! You’ve disappeared again, strategized
a pretext. Blackout. Death

is instantaneous. Torture, endless. Hunger,
slow. Shit a scandal of humiliation. Torment
deeper than a half-life is long.

The afternoon is ordinary. You are about to take a next breath, to shoot
an email to your publisher that contains your manuscript, Daily Minutia. The server
is hungry for fresh insights. It drags your text into the nearest hog-
shaped cloud. You have no teeth to speak of.

You ponder atomic particle theory. Trying
to manifest reality,
bitch-slap the keyboard.

He called from the marshes of Satilla Shores where there’s no reception at all.

He called from Minneapolis through a busted windpipe to tell you of the mastermind.

He called from Louisville awakened by a battering ram.

He called from Portland choking out the names of vanished people.

He left you a message from Chicago about meeting up in Kansas City,

He said, blossoms fall on the Day of the Dead.
You are a dreaded weed about to be pulled.

Karen Morris received The Gradiva Award for Poetry (2015, NAAP) for her full-length collection CATACLYSM and Other Arrangements (Three Stones Press). Her poems have appeared in Chiron Review, Plainsongs, The Stillwater Review, Paterson Literary Review, SWWIM Everyday, and others. She is a psychoanalyst by profession and an Ambassador of Hope for Shared Hope International in the role of volunteer public educator concerning the impact of the commercial sex industry in the sex trafficking of children around the world. She is a cofounder of Two Rivers Zen Community in Narrowsburg, New York.

Image: David Alfaro Siqueiros Echo of a Scream, 1937, MOMA.

America likes to ask

By Emily Knapp

Are you like me? or

not like me?

Are you normal? or

not normal?

Are you human? or

not human?

Are you a boy? or

a girl?

Are you a woman? or

a man?

America likes to say:

We are right.

You

are wrong.

We are normal.

You

are not.

Fit into my box

face the consequences.

Emily Knapp is a writer and comedian living in Denver. She is originally from Chicago, but fled west because she really likes seeing the sun in February. Her poetry has been featured in Writers Resist and Fearsome Critters, and her satire has been featured in Funny-ish, Slackjaw, The Chicago Genius Herald, and Westish. You can read more of her writing on emilyknappwriter.com.

WODB image created by Karla Webb.

Gravity Ungrateful

By Mark Blickley

Yes, I am dressed in mourning.
Dark clothes for a dark time.
Yet I yearn to escape
pandemic imprisonment
with the germ of an idea
that will allow me to soar
above my confinement
in an airborne threat
against complacency and boredom
as I reach up to a blue heaven
that promises social distancing
on a cosmic scale.
But that old bitch gravity
bears down on me,
slapping me down
like a petulant child
crying out
for what she cannot have,
slammed back
to a blanketed earth
of red white and blue.

Mark Blickley is a proud member of the Dramatists Guild and PEN American Center. His latest book is the text-based art collaboration with fine arts photographer Amy Bassin, Dream Streams.

Photo by Shane Rounce on Unsplash.

The everyday

By Ronna Magy

Here, another day, another morning,
another hour, another moment.
Mantle clock refusing to turn
even half round the dial.

She is, he is, they are, the country is,
waiting. For TV anchors, doctors, government officials to
discuss, divulge, to declare
in words, phrases, sentences,
in passages clearly anchored to the land,
stone posts rooted in the earth.
Waiting for words that will
free them, shake them loose from the
unending same: same walls, same doors,
same kitchen, same floors,
same tables, same light fixtures,
the same soundless air.

Hovering about, around, above words, the
numbers rise. Eighteen million
cases yesterday, eighteen million, two hundred thousand today.
Numbers of masks, ventilators, numbers of
black plastic bags.
By noon, the numbers
soar from the charts.
Red line crosses blue.
Red climbing upwards
when it’s supposed to
point down.

Air in the house never
seeming to move.
Dust on cup, saucer, spoon,
dust seeping through cracks.
Dusty soup ladle
arched in the sink.

This, one more morning,
afternoon, one more evening,
one more moment in unmoving space.
Each clock tick
echoing the second before.

Born in Detroit, Michigan, writer Ronna Magy calls Los Angeles home. In her poetry, Ronna combines roots in the rustbelt, community organizing, decades of teaching ESL, and a deeply held belief in social justice. Her work has appeared in: American Writers Review, Persimmon Tree, Nasty Women Poets, Sinister Wisdom, In the Questions, Glitterwolf, Southern Review, Musewrite, and Lady Business: A Celebration of Lesbian Poetry.

Photo by Anthony Tran on Unsplash.

tell me you’re open

By A. Martine

Editor’s warning: sexual violence

i wake from the dream with gashes in my chest
snakes turning warm on my blood
half-interred in the wounds
while i go maybe it was me
surely it was me, surely it was me

athena would have torn
them from me and slung them
at my head to stop the babble
had i, in her temple, done the babbling

it wouldn’t have made a difference that i was
sixteen and he thrice that, rapacious
where i was not: he bore poseidon’s might
by virtue of being a man. even his
threats colored off like jazzy quips
to surrounding ears

till even i considered
maybe it was me, maybe it was me
till i inflected each word in turn
to change the sentence’s meaning

and make it more + less palatable

friendless forlorn empty dysmorphic
and sixteen, and sixteen, and sixteen
the sort of spotlight that should be
exhilarating: gift after
palliation after urging
meant to soft-pedal the panic gong

he said
tell me you’re open
instead
don’t say no, say maybe
be kind
i am offering love
and you
are killing, are killing
me

violation: to be stripped
to the flaring
flesh, and be demanded modesty

it’s been over ten years now
i’ve said it with less conviction since
knowing better

but sometimes i am capsized
from pre-slumber by that thought
maybe it was me
surely it was me
i said no, said no again
should have maybe sung it like a gorgon

A. Martine is a trilingual writer, musician and artist of color who goes where the waves take her. She might have been a kraken in a past life. She’s an Assistant Editor at Reckoning Pressand co-Editor-in-Chief/Producer/Creative Director of The Nasiona. Her collection AT SEA, which was shortlisted for the 2019 Kingdoms in the WildPoetry Prize, is forthcoming from CLASH BOOKS. Some words are found or forthcoming in: Déraciné, The Rumpus, Moonchild Magazine, Marías at Sampaguitas, Luna Luna, Bright Wall/Dark Room, Pussy Magic, South Broadway Ghost Society, Gone Lawn, Boston Accent Lit, Anti-Heroin Chic, Cosmonauts Avenue, Tenderness Lit. Follow her on Twitter, @Maelllstrom and visit her website at www.amartine.com.

French Medusa mask, gilt bronze, late 18th century–early 19th century, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Editor’s note: If you are experiencing, or have experienced, sexual, physical, psychological, emotional, and/or financial violence, you do not deserve; it is a crime. If you are in the United States, please call the National Sexual Assault Hotline, at 1-800-656-4673, or the National Domestic Violence Hotline for help: 1-800-799-7233.

Refugees Displaced in Foil

By Uzomah Ugwu

The guards did not even give us numbers
or sound the vowels in our broken names
that were whole before we arrived
at this destination
that keeps us moving in grief.

She asked what I wanted to eat
like we weren’t going to die here
at any minute, any hour,
borrowed moments we could,
would, not be given back.

She asked with a burnt punctuation
I was forced to feed on for a while ’til
I forged an answer off my dry and unused throat.
Words I cannot remember at all
95 degrees, it did not matter

She grabbed my hand and placed it on my belly,
like she was giving me direction to another life,
and smiled. I wanted to beg her
to take her happiness away
for this was not the place,
here where we laid wrapped in aluminum,
where they baked off our rights as they chose.

We did not give up our freedoms
to feel this consumed.

Her eyes yielded to the floor
for we all were crossing over the border
in hopes of so much more.

Such a high risk for a life
we thought was a myth.
Was it worth it to be sitting here,
like a chicken on a stick
they do not even turn over—do or won’t?

Before I could listen to my grief any longer
she stopped me, looked at me
leaving thorns in my eyes as she said,

“You are always going to be them.”
If you don’t think you have worth in this life,
if you don’t, they will eat you alive.
She took my hand and gave me an orange and smiled,
gazing at the foil that covered us,
smothered refugees

Uzomah Ugwu is a poet-writer and activist.

Photo credit: Mitchell Hainfield via a Creative Commons license.

Trump Tower

By Lao Rubert

She thought life in the castle would be great,
high up in the palace where Anne Boleyn had lived,
but had forgotten to read her history,
was busy with reality TV and those tasks
were the business of her personal Cromwell,
the minister who neglected to inform her
of the bruised eyes of the late wives,
the turret and the rolling heads.

He had forgotten to mention that her beloved was a poster boy,
a plump model of abuse all dressed up in power, a real
royal bully with sycophants using the power of state
to contain his paramour, who happened to be her.
She never saw the beautiful bondage,
never saw the bully buoyed by his armada.
She was too busy purchasing the next gown
when the guillotines went up,
the next reality star took her place and her head fell
swinging into the basket
leaving her body,
fresh perfumed pulp for the tabloids.

Lao Rubert is a poet and advocate for criminal justice reform living in North Carolina. Her poems have appeared in Barzakh, New Verse News, the NC Independent, The Davidson Miscellany, and the Raleigh News and Observer.

Editor’s note: If you are experiencing physical, psychological, emotional, sexual and/or financial abuse, you do not deserve; it is a crime. Please call the National Domestic Violence Hotline for help: 1-800-799-7233.

Image credit: The British Museum.

An Accounting

By Dianne Wright

“What is poetry which does not save nations or people” – Czeslaw Milosz

of the knowns:

25 years, the age of Ahmaud Arbery, gunned down by
2 white men.
1 white man filmed the assault.
2 prosecutors recused themselves.
1 recused prosecutor recommended no charges.
0 charges brought against the shooters for 2 months.
0 people who came to his assistance as he ran for his
1 life.
0 weapons found on his innocent, dead body.
2 times I have walked uninvited in an unconstructed house with no consequences.

of the unknowns:

How many yards did Ahmaud run to escape the killers?
How many heard LeBron James say
“We’re literally hunted every day”?
Where is the violence? On the streets? In the hearts of white men and women?
What are the right questions to ask and who should be asking them?

How many white people will open their eyes to this mortal wound?
Rise up against it?
What’s the story going to be this time?
Am I doing enough showing? Or too much telling?
What would a poem look like that exhorts white people to action?

In the moral wilderness I see people running for
their lives while streetlights reflect the shiny
triggers of guns in pale hands and I
raise my cup to drink a glass of sparkling metaphors
but the bubbles blast my eyes, blind me to my own

culpability and failure to do the right thing.
If the function of freedom is to free someone else*
how many poems will it take
to take down white supremacy?
Is that poem a blunt instrument or a song?

Dianne Wright is a disabled poet and social justice activist who lives in the High Desert with her 2 cats.

Photo credit: Victoria Pickering via a Creative Commons license.

* From Toni Morrison’s 1979 Barnard Commencement Speech, “I Am Alarmed by the Willingness of Women to Enslave Other Women.”

Here in the Future

By Keith Welch

The Future Ain’t What it Used to Be. –Yogi Berra

We were promised flying cars,
and condos on the moon, even
racial equality: all those great sci-fi gags.

Those were the glory days,
the Future. Everything polished
smooth and covered in chrome.

In the fifties, we had the scent
of unlimited progress in our
exceptional American nostrils—

the Future marched forward,
smelling of plutonium and plastic,
with just a hint of napalm. The Future
chanted loudly as it came on.

Then the sixties were assassinated
and we got the hard word,
written in blood: that much
optimism might be overly optimistic.

Welcome to the future, where flying
cars remain scarce, the moon remains
distant, and we have all the equality
our police will allow.

Keith Welch lives in Bloomington, Indiana where he works at the Indiana University Herman B Wells library. He has no MFA. He has poems published in The Tipton Poetry Journal, Open: Journal of Arts & Letters, Dime Show Review, and Literary Orphans, among others. He enjoys complicated board games, baking, talking to his cat, Alice C. Toklas, and meeting other poets. His website is keithwelchpoetry.com. On Twitter: @TheBloomington1.

Image Credit, “Modern Kitchen” by Mike Licht.

With great haste, but still too late

By Laura Mazza-Dixon

Evidence accumulates
as one by one, those who suffered
while the truth was silenced
begin to find the courage to speak.

Congress tells us that all will be done
with care, new revelations investigated,
whistleblowers protected.

On another channel, others deny
all wrongdoing, again and again,
mounting their defense
in louder and louder voices.

You can choose to believe
those on one side or the other.
There is no middle ground.

In between the news reports,
the advertisements for the latest
cars and medications run nonstop.

We cook, listen to the news, eat dinner,
and wash the dishes, wondering
how and if we are responsible,

knowing that even if we all agreed
about what is true, and even if
we acted with great haste,

it would be too late to save the people
driven from their homes in Syria yesterday,
today, tonight and tomorrow,

too late for the people swept
off the islands of the Bahamas,
too late to retrieve the glaciers
dissolving into the sea,

too late for the child
drowned in her father’s arms
in the river between danger
and the promised land.

A Pushcart Prize nominee, Laura Mazza-Dixon has been featured in both the Hartford Courant Poet’s Corner and the Simsbury Community Television’s Speaking of Poetry Series. Her poetry collection, Forged by Joy, was published in January of 2017. More information on it is available on the Antrim House website (www.antrimhousebooks.com/mazza-dixon.html). Mazza-Dixon lives in Granby, CT where she directs the Windy Hill Guitar Studio. She is co-artistic director of The Bruce Porter Memorial Music Series and has performed on classical guitar and viola da gamba across New England. She also organizes the Poetry at the Cossitt series at the F. H. Cossitt Library in North Granby, CT, and has organized two poetry workshops titled “Words That Matter: Courageous Conversations on Race” for the UCC churches in Granby.

Photo by Heather Zabriskie on Unsplash.

Honduran Refugees in My Classroom 2

By Alexander P. Garza

Editor’s warning: assault, violence against women

“Mira a mi tia.” Look at my aunt.
“La mataron.” They killed her.

She shows me a photo on her phone:
a black honduran woman, motionless,

face down, half-naked, ass exposed,
top torn. The girl tells me her aunt’s just been

raped and murdered, left dead.
She got the photo via text from a family friend.

The image forever ingrained in my brain
during our history class, right then.

“Another one down,” she says in Spanish.
“Glad we got out,” she says.

Alexander P. Garza is a writer, actor, and educator from Houston, TX. His work can be seen in Veil: Journal of Darker Musings, Thirteen Myna Birds, Black Poppy Review, and others. He was awarded the 2019 Dark Poetry Scholarship Award by the Horror Writers Association, was commissioned by the Museum of Fine Arts Houston and Tintero Projects for work inspired by their Latin American Exhibit: Play and Grief, and he has worked on and offstage at the Alley Theatre, Houston Grand Opera, Main Street Theater, and Mildred’s Umbrella Theatre Company. Visit him on Instagram/Twitter, @alexanderpgarza, and on his website http://www.alexanderpgarza.com.

Photo credit: LasTesis performs the feminist anthem “Un violador en tu camino” (“A rapist in your way”), in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, from Honduras Tierra Libre.

Lynched

By Julie Weiss

Editor’s warning: violence, racism

—For Robert Fuller

There’s a body hanging from a branch
outside City Hall & nobody is talking.

The sky cowers under its predawn cloak.
The tree holds its breath.

This is not a Discovery Channel documentary
set in the Antebellum South

or an antique postcard from the 1920s,
sold as a souvenir to grinning spectators.

Did they jostle each other for a spot
at the front, inches from the man

being hoisted to his death?
There’s a body hanging from a branch

in a 21^st century California suburb.
The tree is full, leaves glistening,

much like the one we lean against
while picnicking with our children,

white & unafraid, oblivious
to the nooses that have squeezed

the breath out of Black families
for centuries.

Whoever claimed time marches onwards
lied. Decades struck backwards

under the lash of the past
as the morning newscast fades

to black & white.
Suicide, they’ll say. A coincidence:

all these unbalanced, pandemic-stricken
Black men hanging themselves

in the thick of a revolution.
His body, now slumped on the ground,

blazes in the colors of sunrise
& nobody is talking.

Julie Weiss found her way back to poetry in 2018 after slipping into a nearly two-decade creative void. In 2019, she was a Best of the Net nominee. In 2020, she was a finalist in Alexandria Quarterly´s first line poetry contest series and a finalist for The Magnolia Review´s Ink Award. Recent work appears in Praxis Magazine, Anti-Heroin Chic, Kissing Dynamite Poetry, and others, and she has poems in a handful of anthologies, as well. Originally from California, she teaches English in Spain, where she lives with her wife and two young children. You can find her on Twitter @colourofpoetry or on her website at julieweiss2001.wordpress.com.

Photo credit: Marilyn Peddle via a Creative Commons license.

Encomium for the First Truly Epic Poem

By M. J. Lewis

This is the best poem you have ever read.
Everybody is saying it. Everyone.
Other poems have tried to be as wonderful,
tried to be honored with the best aesthetics,
struggled to be as tremendous as this
and to get away with things like that—believe me—
but they don’t know how. They’re weak and small;
they whine and fumble and lose all the time,
lose to limericks and haiku, senryu and lays.

But not this poem.

This poem spawns only success, has nothing but victories,
knows nothing of loss or the literature of losing,
can’t keep itself from winning, always, bigly.

There has never been a poem like this one.
Elegies and epithalamiums, idylls and odes,
Sestinas and sonnets and carpe diem canzones—
all have tried and failed to be as terrific as this,
the greatest poem, in the greatest journal,
in the greatest country, in the greatest universe on Earth.

This poem is freedom.
This poem doesn’t hide behind walls: it builds them.
This poem is a leader, a champion of meter,
of measures that beat the best out of everyone.
This poem is faith, the flag, a founding father:
a loaded gun in a good man’s hand.
This poem is the voice of America—the groin
in the bridge to a better tomorrow.

Literature, everywhere, is broken—lies in ruins.
But not this poem. Never.
No one had ever heard of Ozymandias—of might or despair.
But this poem had—and only it has the answers, has a plan.
Only this poem is doing something about the wreckage,
the crumbling rubble that sad, little phonies have left us with.
Only the feet of this poem can stand in the swamp,
Only its passages can get us back on the course.

This poem takes risks (like zeugma) but not you for a fool.
Very fine people know this poem puts them first.
But this poem loves the others too, even critics, even readers.
Some of this poem’s best friends are readers.

This poem is going very well, don’t you think?
It really is amazing. Incredible.
It has all the best words.
It’s already shown you some very important stanzas.
Very important stanzas.
This poem alone knows how welcome you are.

There is just nothing like this poem. Nothing.
And only this epic—really something very special—
can make things better and the better the best.
By simply gazing on such greatness,
you can feel yourself begin
to slide past goodness.
By surveilling and scanning but never quite reading, you
can already feel yourself tired of winning,
can already feel yourselves safer, more similar,
can already feel this poem, like nothing before in history,
through huge epizeuxis and classy anaphora,
making us great again great again great again.

Making us more like this poem.

M.J. Lewis is a critic, cartoonist at www.gapintheatlas.com, and creative writer. He is currently an assistant professor of literature at Al-Quds Bard College in Abu Dis, Palestine.

Photo credot: Internet meme.

in memory of the coptic bus martyrs

who were murdered on their way to

st. samuel the confessor monastery

may 26, 2017

By Sister Lou Ella Hickman

the wheels of the buses that went round and round came to a stop
who was the first one to descend
stepping into the hot sand
then signed the most ancient of signs
the cross
on a forehead and chest
did the fingers linger on the lips with the silent blessing
i go to God
who would be the last to collapse in death
having watched the sun-blazed terror of bullets
consume even children

Sister Lou Ella Hickman’s poems and articles have appeared in numerous magazines and journals as well as four anthologies. She was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2017. Her first book of poetry, she: robed and wordless, was published in 2015 (Press 53).

Image credit: “The icon of Saint Samuel the Confessor at the entrance of His monastery, Egypt,” from st-takla.org.

Coming Home

By Nathan Porceng

Another thing romanticized
by media and movies,
no banners,
no kisses,
no parades,
and frankly I’m
thankful for that.

What I’m NOT
thankful for
is this 12 hour
overnight layover
in the barren
Oakland airport.

Air Force pains
to foot the bill
to fly its “brothers”
home,
so we go civilian.
Better planes,
shittier schedules,
gotta go
lowest fare,

so the yeomen
booked us here,
stranded in Oakland.

Airport closed
before arrival.
No one warned us.
Would have picked up
snacks back in Hawaii
if they had.
Unable to afford
hotel money or time,
Ellie and I
hunker down behind
a customer service
counter.

Ellie has a pillow
and an airline blanket
saved from the days
they gave them out.
Beset by fatigue
five months in the making
Ellie fast falls
asleep.

I envy her.
Caught where rest
is impossible,
I recline my head
against my backpack,
still reeking of amine,
and torpedoman flatulence.

It’s 1 AM.
The airport is deserted
save for sleeping Ellie,
two cross-terminal shipmates,
and the cleaning staff
prepping for tomorrow.

A worker,
wizened
and bag-eyed,
approaches.
I expect him
to tell us
we can’t be here,
to fuck on out
of his airport.
Instead he asks
if I’ve seen
his ring.

We spend the next hour
looking together.
His name is Larry
and his wife
is going to kill him.

Nathan Porceng is a Washington based poet, songwriter, and submariner. As part of the band Bridge Out, he won first place at the 2014 Northeastern Songwriter Festival in Brookfield, CT. He enjoys the works of The Clash and Adrienne Rich.

Photo credit: Jim Epler via a Creative Commons license.

I Turn 39 During the Pandemic and My Husband Asks Me to Buy a Gun

By Brianna Pike

while we sit in our kitchen, our son asleep upstairs. Earlier, I sat on our back deck, the sunlight beating bold over the lawn as my son streaked across the newly green grass, falling over & over into its softness. It is my birthday & I did not expect this gift of green yellow and birdsong but I am grateful as my husband comes through the gate carrying tulips & iris & pussy willows bundled in plastic. He went to the store to buy flowers. He went to the store to buy chocolate cake. He went because I asked him to. I didn’t think it a burden, this simple request of cake and flowers to celebrate my body on the brink of a new decade. The only corona I considered were the nodding yellow centers of my daffodils. When I spoke to my therapist later that afternoon, after my husband returned, after I put the flowers in water & the cake in the fridge, I told her I was fine in quarantine. I told her I was fine working from home. I told her I was fine. I am thinking of my therapist & nodding yellow coronas & chocolate cake as my husband braces both hands on the kitchen island & looks to where I sit at the kitchen table in a chair my mother painted, the seat covered in a bright yellow chrysanthemum. Yellow flowers, yellow sun, yellow kitchen cabinets, yellow, yellow everywhere when my husband says: I want a shotgun. I am immediately red, immediately forgetful of flowers & cake & birthdays, but he keeps talking: first line of defense, it is your choice & I am scared. He repeats consider, consider, consider as if I will not. As if I will not imagine, for days, the shiny barrel of a gun hidden in a box beneath our bed or in our closet. As if I will not imagine someone smashing in our picture window, the window I stood in front of for an entire summer the year our son was born. As if I will not hear feet on the stairs or the rattle of a door knob each night as I try to fall asleep. As if I do not already see this new world every time I open my eyes. As if I do not understand, that it is already here.

Brianna Pike is an Associate Professor of English at Ivy Tech Community College. Her poems and essays have appeared in So to Speak, Connotation Press, Heron Tree, Memoirs & Mixtapes, Whale Road Review, Utterance & Juxtaprose. She currently serves as an Editorial Assistant for the Indianapolis Review and lives in Indy with her husband and son.

She blogs at briannajaepike.wordpress.com. Find her on Instagram @Bri33081.

Photo credit: Andrew Fogg via a Creative Commons license.

Responsibility

By James Scruton

If they don’t treat me right, then I don’t call.
Maybe Pence or someone else will do it.
I don’t take responsibility at all.

These governors want me to take the fall.
But I show them who’s boss, tweet after tweet.
If they won’t treat me right, I just won’t call.

We have a billion tests. They’re beautiful,
Like me. But I don’t know what’s in each kit.
I don’t take responsibility at all.

Who says the virus would’ve leaped my Wall?
That’s just Fake News, Obama, and the Deep State
Talking. They don’t treat me right. They don’t. I call

Them any names I want. Because the ball
Is in my court. A powerful ball. Very tremendous court.
But I don’t take responsibility at all.

Over the governors, my Constitutional
Authority is perfect. It’s absolute.
But will they treat me right? Not my call.
They know I’m not responsible at all.

James Scruton’s most recent collection is The Rules (Green Linden Press, 2019).

Photo credit: Harry S. Truman’s desk sign from the Truman Library.

Post-Election Meltdown

By Marcella Remund

I am 60 years old. In my lifetime,

my mother’s lifetime, and all the
lifetimes that came before,
no woman has been president.

Don’t tell me to get over it

I have TRAINED blonde footballers
for jobs I couldn’t get without a penis,
jobs that paid ten times my single-mom
salary. After 40 years, I still must work

harder, longer, sweeter to make less.
I have been the “chick in the band.”

I am afraid to go out alone at night.
To walk alone, eat alone, travel alone.
I have been targeted as a child, nine
months’ pregnant, wrinkled and old.
Pedophiles picked me out at 7, at 13.

Don’t tell me to let it go.

I have worked since I was 14.
So has my mother, who worked
two and sometimes three jobs
until she was 70, so had my
grandmother, both of them always,
always, still expected to keep a clean
house, put dinner on the table, pay
bills, keep four kids quiet.

Don’t tell me to move on.

I have daughters, daughters-in-law,
granddaughters, nieces, girl cousins,
sisters-in-law. Their world will go on
just like before, unequal, unsafe, unjust,
until those men are gone—you know
who they are—and worse:

they will inherit a tanking economy
for all but billionaires, greed and profit
our national anthem, international
isolation in our buffoonery, and worse:

open, ignored, sanctioned hatred
and humiliation aimed at my non-male,
non-white, non-Christian, non-straight,
othered friends & family (and yours,
because you have them too).
The list of damages goes on and on.

Don’t tell me we have other work to do.

I have earned this anger.

DO YOU HEAR ME?

Don’t tell me not to feel this grief,
this disbelief, this loss of faith.
I will open my heart and my home
to those who are terrified, paralyzed,
hopeless. And I will move on,
get over it, let it go when I’m
goddam ready. Until that moment,
I will keep screaming

NO.

Marcella Remund is a native of Omaha, Nebraska, and a South Dakota transplant, where she teaches English at the University of South Dakota in Vermillion. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals. Her chapbook, The Sea is My Ugly Twin, was published in 2018 by Finishing Line Press, and her first full-length collection, The Book of Crooked Prayer, is forthcoming from Finishing Line in 2020.

Photo credit: The sculpture, “Innovation,” is by artist Badral Bold, made with horse tail. It is photographed by Frank Lindecke via a Creative Commons license.

A Friability Test

By Kimutai Allan

You can try
muzzling the press
and stifling healthy discourse.
They are actions, easy.
It’s a different tale
down in our hearts.
You can’t break us.
We aren’t as friable as
your petty thoughts deem.

Kimutai Allan is an emerging Kenyan writer. His works have been published previously by The Active Muse, The Writer’s Space Africa, the Kalahari Review and the Naluubale Review. He is currently working on a collection of poems.

Photo credit: The image of “Censor” by Eric Drooker was shot by Luciano, via a Creative Commons license.