right to vote – Writers Resist

Questions/Answers (for Black U.S. citizens applying to register to vote in Selma, Alabama, in 1963—based on actual exams)

By Ellen Girardeau Kempler

After you pay your poll tax, Boy, I’ll ask you

how many jellybeans are in the big jar
I keep on my Registrar’s desk?

How many bubbles are in this bar
of soap?

How many seeds are in a watermelon,
any watermelon? (An answer you should
naturally know.)

How many drops of water are in the Alabama River
running faster than you could ever march, under the bridge
named for the KKK’s Grand Dragon, the bridge you’ll have to cross
before the correct answers to my questions even begin to become clear,
before, out of the tear gas fog, you feel the shock of electric cattle prods,
the whack of lead pipes raised to concuss you past thought, only then
will you understand that NO is the answer to ALL of my questions.

Because I am your judge, jury and executioner.
Because NO is the only way we can keep you chained
caged buried burned drowned beaten hanging
in the place where we first brought you,
intended you to stay.

Ellen Girardeau Kempler’s poems have appeared in the 2022 Mindful Poetry Anthology, Narrative Northeast, Writers Resist, Phoenix Rising Review, Gold Man Review, Orbis International Poetry Quarterly and many other small presses and anthologies. In 2016, she won Ireland’s Blackwater International Poetry Prize and honorable mention in Winning Writers’ Tom Howard/Margaret Reid Poetry Contest. Called “a timely and powerful selection of climate poetics,” her chapbook, Thirty Views of a Changing World: Haiku + Photos, was published in December 2017 by Finishing Line Press. Learn more at www.ellengirardeaukempler.com and follow her on Instagram @placepoet and Twitter @goodnewsmuse.

Image credit: Courtesy of the poet, an image from the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute.

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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.

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.