Author: Editor

Welcome to Writers Resist the Summer 2026 Issue

This is Writers Resist‘s tenth summer, and this issue is one of our most challenging—not solely due to its size. Perhaps it’s the prolonged exposure to putrid politicians (a putrescence of politicians, if you’ve an affinity for terms of venery) that has inspired the constellation of passions reflected in the issue. From the analogies in nature’s invasives, in Danita Dodson’s poem, to raging against ICE, in Karen Crawford’s spoken word poem, these creations ring the truth, the despair, the joy, the hope. And we hope you find all this as you make your way through the summer of 2026.

The virtual reading for this issue is on Saturday 11 July at 5:00 pm PACIFIC. Please email us at writersresist@gmail.com for the Zoom link.

Now, a little note from our publisher: I admit defeat; YouTube and I are not friends. While I seek absolution from the literary gods and our contributors who’ve been asking to see their recorded readings, I’m praying for someone who will teach me how to post our readings on YouTube. I have the basics (sort of), but they need those opening and closing title slide thingies, and more patience than I’ve been able to muster. If someone will take pity and walk me through the process, I will be exceedingly grateful. If you’re out there, please send me an email at kbgressitt@gmail.com.

Finally, and most important, Writers Resist the Summer of 2026:

Invasives by Danita Dodson

Goodbye and Good Riddance by Carolyn Gevinski

Deliverance by Phyllis Wax

13 Ways of Looking at Wicked by Suzanne Edison

Insurance Approved by Samantha Lucia

CASE FILE #1776″ The Murder of Lady Liberty by Daniel P. Douglas

astomatous by Victoria Reyes

Flying Free by Marc Audet

The In-Between by Krista Lee Hanson

The Law by Anne Reiner

The Boy by Raima Larter

Fog of War by Laura Buxbaum

How to Ignite Polite Fires by Em Arata-Berkel

In the Unlikely Event by Rebecca Watkins

While Europe Was Burning by Tytti Heikkinen

Someone Will Be Right With You by Laura Grace Weldon

Fruit Flies by Deborrah Corr

No Quarter by Julie Gard

Two Poems by Erin Vaughn

Dear Colleague: by Shannon Frost Greenstein

To the League of Extraordinary Ladies by Sarah Gane Burton

They Forget by Mandy Prell

Something So Small by Phebe Jewell

The Janus of Freedom by D. Edgar Cook

To those out there with hope by Catherine Zickgraf

Winter in Certain American Cities by Alina Zollfrank

Unbroken by Karen Crawford

Photo credit: K-B Gressitt.

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 on our Give a Sawbuck page.

Invasives

By Danita Dodson

Better the autumn olive growing wild, the kudzu dragging
barns back into earth, the honeysuckle choking
fenceposts—than the fever of a nation shuttering its gates to
human dreams. Better the Johnson grass towering over
barbed wire, the Hungarian brome in ditches, the Nepalese
browntop flaring through fallow fields—than the metal
mouths of B-2s dropped by a madman. Better the red fire
ants swarming, the hairy-tailed mole tunneling beneath the
garden, the sirex woodwasp needling into oaks—than the
muzzling of laughter that once lit living rooms. Better the
foul-sweet blossoms of the Bradford pear, the empress tree
with its fake royalty, the tree of heaven cracking
foundations—than the boots on the ground overtaking cities.
Better the deadnettle carpeting lawns, the spotted knapweed
sprawling, the Chinese lespedeza colonizing
roadsides—than the gerrymandered erasure of communities.
Better the ornamental burning bush gone rogue, the winter
creeper winding tight, the gall wasp swelling branches—than
the whitewashing of history in national museums. Better the
starling’s dark flash at dusk, the gecko skittering glass, the
Cuban treefrog calling from a drain—than the children
counting bodies instead of stars. Let the marmorated stink
bug clatter at window-screens. Let the spotted-wing
drosophila turn sweet fruit sour. Let the fire ant decapitating
fly do its clean work. I will not spend time and money on
pesticides. There are far more critical plagues to name, to
fight, to root out.

Danita Dodson is an educator, literary scholar, and the author of three poetry
collections, Trailing the Azimuth (2021), The Medicine Woods (2022), and Between
Gone and Everlasting (2024), all published by Wipf and Stock. Her poems have
appeared in Salvation South, Tennessee Voices, Braided Way, Women Speak,
Untelling, and elsewhere. She is a native of the Cumberland Gap region of East
Tennessee, where she hikes and explores local history connected to the wilderness. For
more, visit www.danitadodson.com.

Photo credit: Neal Wellons via a Creative Commons license.

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 on our Give a
Sawbuck page.

Goodbye and Good Riddance

By Carolyn Gevinski

This is not Polly’s first murder, Polly thinks. Malbec blood spills between her fingers.

But this is the first time she feels for what she’s done. Guilt, in every crevice of her body. Shards of remorse, glass between her thighs.

It’s a stupid thought, but she thinks it anyway. Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.

Even when Calum Allenton’s Dodge Challenger spun off Route 9 and wrapped like violet licorice around a streetlamp, Polly felt nothing. Nothing, but the sharp swell of relief.

“Good riddance,” she said aloud to the town paper. The paper didn’t talk back, but her mother smacked her bald across the face.

“You killed him! You killed him!”

Spread-eagled in a blossom of red, Polly coos to the dead thing. “You didn’t deserve this, dead thing. But life is no fête, I promise you that.” She swims in it, sticky all over. Fractured, splintered, freed, is the dead thing, and Polly is left behind.

It feels right, for an instant, to pretend that the dead thing is taking her with it.

Lead venom from her lips races toward her heart. Useless gray veins under paper. Polly withers before she has the chance to age. The chemical reaches its target and when her eyes flutter closed, a throng of parishioners form a halo in the sky.

“Whore,” they chant, her mother among the cult. “Satan! She-devil!”

Those wretched missionaries. Polly laughs. And once they set her off, she cannot stop. A bubble pops at the corner of her mouth. No air spills between her clenched incisors, but she is laughing, yes laughing. Through the guilt, not over, not under. The dead thing laughs too. Polly can hear it babbling in her mind. They laugh, and they are one, and they are nothing.

Ringing, like bells at Christmas. It’s true that life flashes before your eyes. Polly’s glimmer, and she’s fourteen again.

Tarring mascara and stolen whiskey. A cracker that Calum shows her to feed the ducks with. That is, before he holds her down in the bank.

It’s a curse, to be fourteen.

Calum Allenton drags his feet on the way out, head hung. Ducks into the car. Everyone in school is watching Calum, but Polly is watching Mrs. Abraham. Unabashedly, the woman watches back. Knowing Polly inside out and stuffing strewn all over.

You called them.

A week later, Calum Allenton is dead, and Polly’s mother calls her a killer.

Good riddance, Polly tells the paper.

Good riddance, echoes Mrs. Abraham. The back of her hand feels cool on Polly’s welt.

“You will never be fourteen,” Polly tells the dead thing. They lie together on the grout.

At her checkup, the doctor will whisper, “You did what was necessary.”

But as she’s leaving, the folks with signs will spit at her. So many people have words to say about what Polly’s done.

“Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye,” Polly hisses.

“And good riddance,” she says to the thing that she never wanted, and never wanted to want, and never did.

Carolyn Gevinski’s poems have been published in Across the Margin, Lavender Review, and Prosetrics and are forthcoming in Scapegoat Review, Academy of the Heart and Mind, and ΑΒΛΑΝΑΘΑ. Her journalism can be found in El País, GLAMOUR, Grassroots Magazine, Al Jazeera, and Out Magazine. She is a graduate of Columbia Journalism School, where she currently works on their postgraduate investigative team.

Photo credit: Olya Prutskova via a Creative Commons licanse.

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 on our Give a Sawbuck page.

Deliverance

By Phyllis Wax

Where is the angel
who will save us?

            Not in masked thugs
            who descend on ordinary people
            and whisk them away in unmarked cars           

            Not in civil servants
            who, to keep their jobs,
            bend to the boss’s demands

            Not in political appointees
            who think any law
            can be broken

            Not in judges
            who ignore the harm they do
            when they allow fists on the scales

            Not in educators
            who rewrite history, consider
            facts malleable

            Not in politicians
            who place office above country

No
There is no angel
to save us

Our deliverance will come from ordinary people    
chanting their outrage
in the streets  And from voters
marching to the polls
to restore democracy

We have to save ourselves

Phyllis Wax lives near Lake Michigan in Milwaukee, WI. She grew up in the Washington, DC, area, which might be why social justice issues push their way into much of her work. Also inspired by nature and human nature, as well as by music of all sorts, her poetry has appeared in many publications, including Writers Resist, Jerry Jazz Musician, Rise Up Review, Spillway, Peacock Journal, Wordpeace, New Verse News, Your Daily Poem, Mobius.

Photo credit: Bogdan Krupin via a Creative Commons license.

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 on our Give a Sawbuck page.

13 Ways of Looking at Wicked

By Suzanne Edison

                    All words in italics come from at least one federal agency’s list of
                    “woke” terms that need to be avoided—NYTimes, 11 March 2025

I.
Born in the garden, a sanctuary. No barriers and all beings had a sense of belonging.

II.
Assigned at birth, her gender, female. Though perhaps transgender . . . you know, Adam’s rib, etc.

III.
Her name, Eve, on the cusp of . . . with Hebrew roots, signified life.   Oh, but the trauma

IV.
of knowledge,                      as if pregnant with privilege,                      was deemed a disability

V.
warranting exclusion.

VI.
Her clean energy sex with Adam, i.e. people + uterus = key populations + a brimming bag of pronouns

VII.
increased diversity.             She wandered. An immigrant.                    Was she Black or brown?

VIII.
Racial identity indeterminate.   Equal opportunity victims declare her cultural heritage colorless, as this page.

IX.
(From a scientific perspective, white (light) is all-inclusive of the diverse colors of the visible spectrum.)

X.
Science, expendable, as the Gulf of Mexico—a victim of brain disparity

XI.
from undervalued, biologically male, stereotypes, prolific as climate crises.

XII.
These systemic prostitutes advocate

XIII.
altars to oppression.

Suzanne Edison’s book, Since the House Is Burning, was published by MoonPath Press in 2022. Her poetry can be found in The Missouri Review, Verse Daily, Whale Road Review, Lily Poetry Review, MER, and SWWIM Daily. Her poetry had also been recognized as finalists in Naugatuck River Review and RockPaperPoems. She lives in Seattle, and her website is at www.seedison.com.

Photo credit: Terence Faircloth via a Creative Commons license.

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 on our Give a Sawbuck page.

Insurance Approved

By Samantha Lucia

I said yes to permanence at 27
They called it ESSURE    
They called it SAFE

Two metal coils
threaded
into fallopian tubes
like promises — like policy    

                                                                                          market-vetted
                                                                                          APPROVED
No incisions
In-office procedure

Try coils
thrust raw
into tubes
unanesthetized

                                                                                          Women’s pain
                                                                                          thresholds

Twelve years of
my body screaming,
“STOP!”

And physicians saying,
“PROVE IT.”

The coils scarred over — created blockages
leaked nickel into unwilling tissue

Inflammation exploded
a language I couldn’t speak — but couldn’t stop speaking
A language of pain that      
bent me,   
bowed me,    
made me small

Pain that doesn’t image—
So, they decide,
“You’re imagining.”

                                                                                          even after the
                                                                                          BLACK BOX
                                                                                          warning

                                                                                          even after they
                                                                                          PULLED it
                                                                                          from the
                                                                                          market

Physicians looked and declared,
“Essure doesn’t cause this.”

They KNEW

The market’s small print
had written itself into my organs
in allergy ink

Certified itself
in bedridden years of,
“We need a biological excuse.”

A woman’s pain isn’t valued enough
to remove its source

A woman’s suffering only matters
when it can be CODED
365 days
of merciless bleeding

My body performed its loudest proof —
its most monetizable symptom

Until the insurance surrendered to
a code it recognized

‘Murderous Coils’— NO
‘Diseased Uterus’— YES

                                                                                          INSURABLE

A hysterectomy at 39

                                                                                          becoming
                                                                                          algorithm-
                                                                                          legible

                                                                                          becoming
                                                                                          profitable
                                                                                          loss

The market sold me the device
The market cut it out

They logged it . . . TWICE

Samantha Lucia (she/her) is a queer poet and photographer living in the American South who writes from the archive of a body the record kept getting wrong. Her work has appeared in Corporeal, Poetries in English, MENACE, Witches Magazine, Twisted Tongue, Spellbinder, and January House, among others, and is forthcoming in the 1455 Books: Women Writers Anthology (2026). Follow her on Instagram @iamsamanthalulu.

Photo credit: Ittmust via a Creative Commons license.

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 on our Give a Sawbuck page.

CASE FILE #1776: The Murder of Lady Liberty

By Daniel P. Douglas

New York Police Department – Homicide Division
Detective Joseph “Joe” Law, Badge #1886
October 2025

The call came in at 3:47 AM on a Tuesday that felt like the end of the world’s longest hangover. Rain pounded Manhattan, each drop a reminder that even heaven had given up trying to wash this place clean.

“We got a body,” the dispatcher said, voice deader than yesterday’s coffee. “Big one.”

“How big?”

“Liberty Island big.”

I crushed my Lucky Strike into an ashtray I hadn’t emptied since Bloomberg was mayor and grabbed my coat. In thirty years working NYPD Homicide, I’d fished bodies out of the East River, scraped them off subway tracks, found them stuffed in dumpsters behind bodegas. But this was different. This was America’s dame, face-down in New York Harbor.

VICTIM IDENTIFICATION

Name: Liberty Enlightening the World, aka “Lady Liberty,” “Statue of Liberty”
DOB: October 28, 1886
Height: 305 feet (151 feet without the pedestal)
Weight: The burden of 330 million promises
Last Known Address: Liberty Island, New York Harbor
Occupation: Symbol, Promise-Keeper, Mother of Exiles

The crime scene was Liberty Island, but the blood spatter reached from Battery Park to Ellis Island. Yellow tape couldn’t contain it. The Staten Island Ferry captains were calling in sick rather than sail past her corpse.

INITIAL OBSERVATIONS

She was still warm when I took the police boat over, which told me the murder was fresh as this morning’s bagel. The killer wanted us to find her like this, toppled forward off her pedestal, torch extinguished in the harbor water, tablet cracked down the middle. The inscription remained readable through the break: “Give me your tired, your poor…” But someone had tagged it with red spray paint: “OFFER EXPIRED.”

I lit another cigarette and walked the scene. Her crown’s seven spikes stood bent and twisted. In the water around the island, I found children’s backpacks bobbing in the harbor. Spider-Man, Frozen, Pokémon, the kind kids clutch when masked and uniformed strangers thugs break down doors at dawn.

WITNESS STATEMENTS

David Steinberg, Journalist: “I recorded every broken promise, every shattered law, every deleted regulation. They tried to shut me up, deport my sources, kill my stories. But someone had to keep the record. Someone had to remember what she looked like before they took the knife to her.”

Anonymous Federal Worker: “The shutdown wasn’t chaos—it was surgery. Precise. Calculated. They knew which departments to gut first, which services would scream loudest. Like watching someone dissect a living patient.”

Carmen Rodriguez, Bronx Mother: “They came at 4 AM. ICE, a few of them said, but most said nothing. Took my babies while they were still in their pajamas. My neighbor, she tried to film it. They took her phone. They took her too. And their eyes . . . their ICE eyes looked empty. They’d killed something inside themselves first.”

Mike O’Brien, Con Edison Supervisor: “They cut power to the whole South Bronx last week. Said it was maintenance. But I saw the orders. They came from high up. Real high. They’re turning off the lights, neighborhood by neighborhood, erasing parts of the city.”

AUTOPSY FINDINGS

The coroner was Dr. Ruth Goldstein, been cutting up New York’s dead since Giuliani’s first term. Her hands held steady, but her voice cracked, ice in warm whiskey.

Cause of Death: Multiple contributing factors

  • Acute Constitutional Hemorrhaging
  • Systematic Organ Failure (Justice Department, State Department, EPA)
  • Blunt Force Trauma to Democratic Processes
  • Poisoning via Disinformation (blood toxicity off the charts)
  • Strangulation of Free Press

“Forty years I’ve been doing this,” Goldstein said, peeling off latex gloves. “Seen nothing like it. It’s overkill, Detective. Someone didn’t just want her dead. They wanted to make an example of her.”

SUSPECT PROFILE

The killer operated in broad daylight, Fifth Avenue penthouse type who treated laws as suggestions and democracy like a hostile takeover. This wasn’t a crime of passion. It was a business transaction, hostile acquisition of a 249-year-old corporation.

Physical Description: Spray-tan complexion, architectural hair, suits that cost more than a cop’s annual salary
Known Associates: A rotating cast of oligarchs, fixers, and true believers
Modus Operandi: Gaslight, Obstruct, Project, Intimidate, Lie, etc.
Previous Crimes: See filing cabinets 45 and 47

But here’s what chilled me to the bone: the accessories after the fact. The reps and senators who held her down. The judges who sharpened the blade. The millions who live-streamed the murder and hit “like.”

THE INVESTIGATION

I started where every New York cop starts. I followed the money. It led me through Wall Street towers and offshore shells, through Moscow laundromats and Saudi investment funds. Every thread pulled revealed two more until I had a conspiracy that made the Five Families look like a church bake sale.

The immigration raids. The infrastructure blackmail. The journalist deportations. The power cuts. All connected, all coordinated, all designed to kill not just the body but the very idea of what she stood for.

I interviewed kids from the raids when their lawyers could sneak me past the guards. One girl, maybe seven, drew me a picture with crayons some church lady had smuggled in: Lady Liberty on the ground, her torch being used to burn apartment buildings.

“Is she dead?” I asked.

“Mama says she’s just sleeping,” she whispered. “Says she’ll wake up when enough people remember the dream.”

Three weeks into the investigation, working out of a precinct that felt emptier every day as cops got reassigned to ‘federal support duties,’ I noticed something.

Lawyers working pro bono out of Brooklyn basements. Teachers holding classes in churches when their schools got shut down. New York Times reporters publishing from undisclosed locations after their building got raided. Bodegas feeding families whose food stamps got cut. The city that never sleeps refusing to close its eyes to what was happening.

I took the ferry out to Liberty Island at dawn. The statue remained down, still dead. But in the pre-dawn darkness, I saw them. Thousands of lights. Phones, candles, flashlights from boats. Each one a tiny flame, together bright enough to outline her fallen form.

That’s when I knew what wouldn’t make it into the official report.

FINAL DETERMINATION

Case Status: Homicide confirmed. Victim DOA.

Additional Findings: Unusual post-mortem activity observed. While subject shows no vital signs, grassroots nervous system remains active. Cellular regeneration noted at community level.

Lady Liberty was dead as Hoover. The America that survived the Depression, won the World Wars, faced down the Soviets—that dame had sung her last song.

But here’s what thirty years of homicide taught me: Some victims don’t stay dead. Some ghosts are too stubborn, too angry, too damn New York to stay down.

DETECTIVE’S PERSONAL NOTE

I’ve worked enough murder scenes to know dead when I smell it. But I’ve also lived in New York long enough to know that this city’s got more lives than an alley cat.

The killer’s still walking free, still posting from his penthouse, still signing executive orders with her blood. The accomplices are still on cable news, explaining why she had it coming.

But in the Bronx, mothers are organizing. In Brooklyn, communities are building their own support networks. In Queens, immigrants are documenting everything. In Manhattan, even some Wall Street types are whispering about resistance. In Staten Island . . . well, Staten Island’s complicated, but even there, some folks remember what that torch used to mean.

Lady Liberty is dead. Long live Lady Liberty.

I’m filing this case closed, but I ain’t closing the book. Because every good cop knows that sometimes you solve a murder by making sure the victim comes back to haunt the killer.

The rain’s stopped. Dawn’s breaking gray over the harbor. Somewhere, a kid in P.S. 92 is pledging allegiance to a flag that doesn’t mean what it used to. But maybe—just maybe—it’ll mean something again.

I light my last Lucky of the night and watch the sun rise over the city.

If Liberty’s gonna rise from the dead, it’ll start here, in the boroughs, in the projects, in the spaces between what was and what might be again.

Case closed. Investigation ongoing.

Detective Joseph Law
Badge #1886
NYPD Homicide Division
October 2025

P.S. They can kill the body, but the ghost? The ghost is gonna haunt them till judgment day. And brother, judgment’s coming.

Daniel P. Douglas is the pen name for identical twins Phil and Paul Garver. Daniel P. Douglas has been named a Foreword Reviews 2014 INDIEFAB Book of the Year Awards Science Fiction Finalist and is a Readers’ Favorite Award winner. His first novel, Truth Insurrected: The Saint Mary Project, centered on a decades-old government coverup of contact with extraterrestrial life. The Richter’s War series blends sci-fi with hard-boiled intrigue in Los Angeles during World War II. Douglas’s first nonfiction endeavor, Six-Shooters and Starships: A Comprehensive Guide to Crafting Space Western Stories, explores the rich history of the Space Western genre in fiction and entertainment media. In 2025, the first two books of the space Western series, Wild Frontier Chronicles, were released along with other expanded universe projects. Please visit the “Intelligence Bulletin from Author Daniel P. Douglas” on Substack for more information.

Photo credit: Chris F via a Creative Commons license.

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 on our Give a Sawbuck page.

astomatous

By Victoria Reyes

                    for Mahmoud Khalil

itstartedoffanordinaryday. suddenly:accosted. handcuffed.kidnapped. withoutawarrant &with
holdingtheirnames, ICEagents tearyou fromyourdoctor wife,8monthspregnant, filmingtheordeal.
secretedtoa Louisianabunker, you’regivennopillow tolaydownyourhead, nocloak
tostaveoffthecold, missingthebirth ofyourchild. forwhat longingforaFreePalestine?
anendtogenocide? youareremindedofSyria. Werecall genocide &enslavement asU.S.origins. thereisnofreespeech—

only the rich have mouths.

Victoria Reyes (she/her) is a writer, poet, and scholar. She’s also the author of Global Borderlands: Fantasy, Violence, and Empire in Subic Bay Philippines and Academic Outsider: Stories of Exclusion and Hope. Her poetry has appeared in Feminist Formations, Departures in Critical Qualitative Research, and Dissident Voice.

Photo credit: Henry Burrows via a Creative Commons license.

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 on our Give a Sawbuck page.

Flying Free

By Marc Audet

Lake Whitney shivers as the winter wind descends upon us from the Canadian Arctic. I pause my walk and search for the Canada Geese that visit these waters. They are back this morning, floating some distance away in composed tranquility, hardly noticing me. To think that they dare to cross our northern frontier in contempt of our politics, mocking our insolence to even suggest that we could tell them what to do. They care not for borders, more concerned about that sheet of ice that formed overnight, nudging them to seek shelter in the warmer waters nearer shore, by the clustered rushes where last spring, I saw a mating pair of swans nesting. On this frigid morning, I rest my spirit from the over repeated news cycle and take solace in the calmness of the lakeview before me. The geese are content to wait in the shallows for the seasons to turn. We are creatures less patient, our collective angst seething. We ache to scream, to be heard over sound bites of prevarication, to spread wings and be free again.

Marc Audet lives near New Haven, Connecticut, where he is self-employed as a web application developer. He has traveled and lived in Canada, England, France, and Ireland. His short stories, creative nonfiction, and poetry have appeared in Across the Margin, Flash Fiction Magazine, Uppagus, Rappahannock Review, The Prose Poem, The Gilded Weathervane, and elsewhere.

Photo credit: Tim Rains via a Creative Commons license.

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 on our Give a Sawbuck page.

The In-Between

By Krista Lee Hanson

                          For Renée Nicole Good

You said your soul lived, perhaps,
in-between your pancreas & large intestine.

My soul has been skittish,
these days, hiding, perhaps
in-between my cranium &
cervical spine, under hunched shoulders
bracing for the next disaster,

but your violent
murder,
the sudden snuffing of your life,
your mother-poet light,

the horror of it has shaken me,
rattled something loose,

and in the aftermath my soul has spread
wide as a lake on a windless day,
clear as this winter breath,
fully inhabiting my gut with the knowing:

we are many millions more than
mercenaries and despots,
we the people, who threaten the regime by loving
the things they cannot sell us: our neighbors,
friends and strangers, children and their teachers,
the ones they have insisted are other,

and, also, the migrating birds,
the coyotes and beavers,
the trees with their secret language,
their souls telling stories in the soil,

and the hope that comes,
every single sunrise, that our love
and solidarity is magnetic,
drawing more and more
people into our circles.

You wrote about sacred texts,
wondered about science and
faith meeting, asked if those religions
could be as gentle as your mother,
sliding long hairs behind your ear

and now we know your mother
is both tender and fierce,
your wife, too, speaking your name,
calling you baby—
            drive, baby, drive

& now telling the world
about your Goodness.

Krista Lee Hanson (she/her) lives in Seattle, Washington, home of the Coast Salish people, with her partner and two children. Krista’s writing has appeared in The Rumpus, The Normal School, Rad Families, A Celebration and other publications. She has been a finalist for CRAFT’s Flash Nonfiction prize, and she was nominated for the 2025 Pushcart Best of Small Presses prize. Currently, Krista is writing a memoir about disability and complex care, and organizing with her neighbors to build webs of community care. Visit her website at kristaleehanson.com.

Poet’s Note: This poem is in response to On Learning to Dissect a Fetal Pig, by Renee Good (previously Renee Nicole Macklin).

Photo credit: Diana via a Creative Commons license.

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 on our Give a Sawbuck page.

The Law

By Anne Reiner

                            For Alex Pretti

we’re all under the same law
Newton’s third
where forces always come in pairs 

tear gas roars at 
a citizen
a citizen 
roars back with an
equal and opposite force
of a protest 

a knee pushes against
a neck 
a neck
pushes back with an 
equal and opposite force 
of a movement

an agent of the state shoots
a bullet 
a bullet 
a bullet 
a bullet 
a bullet 
a bullet 
a bullet 
a bullet 
a bullet 
a bullet 

• • •

my young son tells me
a ball could pass through a bat
if all the atoms 
arranged themselves
with unerring exactness

if we the people 
had a rising
that was 
atomic 

and arranged ourselves
just 

so we passed
right through them

a strike without a hit 

in our unequal and opposite 
reaction

to lay down
the law

Anne Reiner is a writer and biostatistician based in New York City. Visit her website at annereiner.com.

Photo credit: Jay Rembert on Unsplash.

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 on our Give a Sawbuck page.

The Boy

By Raima Larter

The boy grasps the rope, swings out over the river whooping, lets go, splashes, laughs. The light is a misty green and it all seems a dream, a time that never was. 

The crowds march in subzero cold, breath freezing in nostrils, shoes squeaking on frozen snow as booted troops watch from the side. Their leader stands calm in his long coat, watching the children wave placards.

The boy’s childish scrawl infuriates the man in the long coat who hustles him into a waiting van. The boy wonders which world he belongs in: the river or the van?

The boy swings out again over the water, dripping from his earlier swim in the lazy river, wondering if this life is the dream or is it the one in the back of a dark van, squeezed between men he doesn’t know. Their bodies stink of fear. Their wrists bleed from tight handcuffs.

The people march. Some wear clerical collars, some robes. They hold up their hands in prayer, chanting. With God all things are possible, they say. God is with you, they promise.

The boy wants to believe. The boy also wants to cover his eyes, block out the world he is in, but he can’t move his hands. He is bound tightly, here among the prisoners. 

The boy wants to believe he is at the river, but he knows he is in the van. It is warmer in the van than it was outside. The boy is glad he still has his nice warm hat. At least he has his hat.

The people march in the street, a sea of humanity blowing whistles. The people shout at the invaders to leave their town, return their children, go back to where they came from, which surely must be hell, a place warmer than the one they march in.

The booted men watch as people surge and fill the streets. The man in the long coat stands, his hands hidden in pockets as the people blow their whistles. 

God is with you, the whistles shriek. God is with you. With God, you can do anything. 

Anything.

Anything.

Before moving to Colorado, Raima Larter was a chemistry professor who secretly wrote fiction and poetry and tucked it away in drawers. She has published four novels, a nonfiction book, and numerous short stories. She is Nonfiction Editor at Utopia Science Fiction. Read more at raimalarter.com.

Photo credit: Enoch Leung via a Creative Commons license.

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 on our Give a Sawbuck page.

Fog of War

By Laura Buxbaum

I’ve been in a fog before – sailing ghostly quiet,
listening for the buoy’s clang, blowing
a feeble horn to warn the ferry or the lobsterman
our small vessel is near, please don’t hurt us.

Brain fog, too – what’s the word I’m looking for? Who
are you, do I know you, did our children
go to school together? Did we make music once?
Did we go to bed together years ago?

Icy sea smoke. Dense cloud my headlights
barely pierce. Fog on a mountaintop, blue
sky on the other side. Gray-white sea through
which the blind and miraculous airplane passes.

We motored up Eggemoggin Reach through
swirling ribbons, wisps like birds or spirits.
We said there must be a thousand words
for fog, for its varied shapes and colors.

Sometimes the mists fooled us, making
distance seem closer or sounds farther
away. Never were we so confused
that we might mistake a drowning sailor

for our enemy. Never did we
sink a boat
then blow up
all of the survivors. 

Laura Buxbaum (she/her) is a re-emerging poet in her sixties, living in Maine. Her pursuits include raising goats, making cheese, making music, and running on local trails. Her poems can be seen in Thimble Lit, Rat’s Ass Review, Brawl, Verse-Virtual, and Soul Poetry, Prose & Arts Magazine. Her poetry explores themes of family, loss, love, and nature. Lately, she’s working to find her sharper edges and explore ways to confront the chaos and darkness we all face.

Photo credit: Fakhri Baghirov via a Creative Commons license.

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 on our Give a Sawbuck page.

How to Ignite Polite Fires

By Em Arata-Berkel

WARNING!
Only burn on a level, fire-resistant surface.
Burn with an extinguisher in sight.
Keep away from flammable objects.
Keep away from children, open windows, or heavily trafficked areas.

BURNING INSTRUCTIONS
Acknowledge the aspirations of a long wick, then
trim to a quarter inch before lighting.
Savor the experience.
Enjoy notes of smoke, wet concrete, pepper spray,
and what you—the rugged individual
must do to fix this.

REMEMBER!
Keep wax free of any foreign materials, which
may generate more fuel than your bell jar can handle.
Do not burn more than four hours at a time.
Cool at least two hours before lighting again.
Stop use when only a finger’s width of wax remains, then

tell yourself you know what it means to ignite trashcan bonfires, raise a barricade, hold a line, pour water into a stranger’s burning eyes, and fourteen hours later, pass along your new friend’s red vine moonshine while feeding stale corn puffs to a blaze fused with a screaming watercolor dawn.

Em Arata-Berkel is an emerging poet who’s taken root in the Pacific Northwest. They earn coin by untangling taxonomies and are seldom without a cuppa something. Their poetry can be found in the award-winning anthology I Sing the Salmon Home: Poems from Washington State and the digital Washington State Queer Poetry Anthology. Find them online at erratawrites.bsky.social.

Photo credit: Filipp Romanovski via a Creative Commons license.

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 on our Give a Sawbuck page.

In the Unlikely Event

By Rebecca Watkins

  1. “I need to buy a bat and a tourniquet,” I say to my husband as I set my bag and keys down.

    “What?” he asks frowning.

    I’ve just come home from a conference day, which in the education system means a day when students stay home, and teachers attend professional development. Normally, I am not a fan. Normally, PD involves learning more acronyms and the latest jargon. Today, however, it felt worthwhile.

    “Oh, we had a shooter training. One of the police officers said we should buy a baseball bat for protection and a tourniquet too because most people die from bleeding out,” I explain.

    I don’t realize at first that my husband is horrified. Then I see anger flash across his face; his eyes narrow as he asks, “Is the school going to buy you a bat and first aid kit for your classroom?”

    “Of course not,” I laugh, “I’ll buy it.”
  2. According to The Washington Post, since Columbine in 1999, there have been 435 school shootings in the United States, and 398,000 students have experienced some form of gun violence at school. You could fill Madison Square Garden to capacity twenty times with that number.
  3. The school is empty of students and quiet except for the sound of teachers filing out of the auditorium. We have just watched an FBI video reenactment of a shooter in a restaurant. I noticed there weren’t any children in this video. They didn’t want to traumatize us, I think later. But as I watched it, my stomach was in knots and my hands clenched hard at my sides. The dead bodies weren’t real, but the taste of fear in my mouth is.
  4. We’ve divided into groups of twenty; my group is on the first floor in the Science Department. Unlike the first few years of school shootings, we are seasoned and know you don’t just hide. You have choices: the Active Shooter Protocol is now Run, Hide, or Fight.

    Don’t panic, a handsome young officer is saying. If you freeze, push through, and take action. It is unlikely an active shooter situation will happen. But you must be prepared if it does.

    Do you know where the exits are?

    We all nod our heads and point to them.

    Learn them all and practice leaving by different ones.
  5. It is unlikely this will happen.

    Any given day at any school, there are 2 to 3 security guards and then hallways full of classrooms with open doors. The officer is telling us once we lock our doors, a shooter isn’t going to try to break them down. But just in case, look around for how we might barricade the door, look around for what we might be able to use as a weapon should a shooter get in. We begin listing the items: books, trophies, chairs.

    It’s ideal to have a bat and go for the head. Don’t hesitate, the young officer is now telling us.Get a good first aid kit with a tourniquet and learn how to use it. If you don’t have one, use a belt.
  6. The AR-15 semi-automatic is dubbed America’s rifle by the NRA and can fire 30 to 100 bullets in rapid succession. The police officer tells us, It’s about body count. That’s why mass shooters will use semi-automatic rifles.
  7. An AR 15 style rifle was used at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida in 2018. At the time, I taught at an urban high school. We were reading a modern telling of Hamlet, and those who were paying attention and reading along felt a kinship with the young protagonist. He had come back home to death and betrayal. Life didn’t turn out how he expected, and these teens understood this better than most. 

    I looked at the clock. My students would be walking out soon. A 17-minute nation-wide protest for the seventeen people, fourteen students and three staff, killed a month ago. I had been instructed to continue teaching, so I stood on the scuffed linoleum floor and watched my students, the majority Black and Latino, stand up and walk out. Most of them already knew what it was like to fight for their lives. This was just the first time they got to acknowledge it publicly.
  8. In May of 2022, nineteen students and two teachers were massacred at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, in the deadliest school shooting since Sandy Hook in 2012 when twenty children and six staff were killed. Uvalde, another place like Parkland or Sandy Hook whose name will become synonymous with children being murdered.
  9. A few days after the shooting in Uvalde, I watched on the news as they showed a recording from that day at Robb Elementary of police officers hiding in a hallway. Some even ran away while children were being gunned down in the classrooms. I felt more rage and grief than my body could hold. Without speaking to my husband, I walked out into the rain, barefoot, waiting for my heartbeat to slow down, waiting for tears that never came. I stifled a scream, one that still burns my throat. As a teacher, it is expected that I will put my body in front of my students when the bullets come. And I will, but on that video, the trained officers ran.
  10. After our active shooter training, I shop online for first aid kits. I spend hours reading the reviews. That night, I don’t have dreams, or if I do, I don’t remember them. Maybe I am clutching a wooden bat, the texture unfamiliar in my hand, as I swing at an intruder. Maybe I’m messing up a tourniquet. Maybe someone’s bleeding out on my classroom floor.
  11. As I write this the most recent school shooting in the United States was thirteen days ago.

Rebecca Watkins holds an MFA in poetry and an MSed from the City University of New York. Her creative nonfiction and poetry have appeared or are forthcoming in Ginosko Literary Journal, the Quartet Journal, Hole in the Head Review, the Amethyst Review and the Amaranth Journal among other literary journals. Her creative nonfiction has been shortlisted for The Malahat Review’s Open Season Awards. She is the author of Field Guide to Forgiveness (Finishing Line Press 2023) and Sometimes, in These Places (Unsolicited Press 2017). More of her work can be found at rebeccawatkinswriter.com. 

Photo credit: John Gateley via a Creative Commons license.

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 on our Give a Sawbuck page.

While Europe Was Burning by Tytti Heikkinen

Artist’s Statement

The creation of this work was influenced by the changed situation in Europe. It was hard to believe that a war could still break out here in the 2020s. All of that was supposed to be over, history was not meant to repeat itself anymore. The fact that it did is still difficult to believe.

Another reason behind the image was the tightening grip of rightwing political and conservative views, which from time to time rear their heads. Fortunately, at the same time, a more liberal world is also being celebrated in the colors of the rainbow. From all this emerged a vision of Classical statues coming to life, who, even in the midst of a burning Europe, focus on what truly matters to them: the encounter between two people, the desire to learn the other completely, and to share one’s life through its twists and turns. Love can make even statues move.

The figures in the image are able to block out the graffiti-stained school assembly hall, a symbol of European cultural heritage, now falling into decay, and the flames blazing through the windows, because even in the midst of fear they are willing to focus on each other.

Dance is an activity that requires both the will and the ability to act together. That is why it is such an important symbol to me. Sometimes, when I watch traditional ballroom dance, I get tears in my eyes, because partner dancing is such a powerful and beautiful art form, regardless of its rhythm.

These Classical figures are dancing traditional Argentine tango. The posture shown in the image is an authentic dance position of the genre.

Tytti Heikkinen (she/her) is a Finnish visual artist working across photography, painting, and digital media. Based in Finland, she has exhibited internationally, with work appearing in Amsterdam Review, Arkana, and Ex-Puritan, among others.

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 on our Give a Sawbuck page.

Someone Will Be Right With You 

By Laura Grace Weldon

Even the book I bring is not enough
to keep me from watching the man tasked
with patient intake. He may be new to the job
or simply struggle with what’s required to 
cope in a time when everyone seems angry. 

Whatever mysterious power transfers emotion 
is at work when I sign in at his window. 
I feel myself gulp and stammer too, 
his hurried keystrokes through my fingers,
his forehead sheen on my face. 

The name he wears on a lanyard 
is turned around and I’m glad 
the angry woman across from him now 
can’t use it to slice her fury 
farther inside with the hissing words 

we hear from our seats.
“I’m sorry” he repeats, 
mantra of all of us who displease 
the world’s scolders, mockers, ragers.
He finally manages what she demands, 

hands over her papers 
with a deference no one deserves. 
I’m called up next and 
notice the soft hairs at his neck, 
his half smile shrug when I sympathize. 

As he leans over to grab a page 
from the copier I see the name
on the other side of his ID. I will not 
share it in this poem as a kindness, 
the only protection I can offer him. 

Laura Grace Weldon lives in a township too tiny for traffic lights where she works as a book editor, teaches writing workshops, serves as Braided Way editor, and chronically maxes out her library card. Laura was Ohio’s 2019 Poet of the Year and is the author of four books. 

Photo credit: Allan Rostron via a Creative Commons license.

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 on our Give a Sawbuck page.

Fruit Flies

By Deborrah Corr

They drone around the now browned bananas 
I forgot to eat when they were fresh and yellow.

Air-born things with wings too tiny 
to be seen, black dots that can’t 

be snatched from the air or smashed 
against the window, out of which I can see 

the Trump flag flying from a house 
down the street. I stood on a corner 

last week with different neighbors, 
rubbing elbows as we held up signs, 

corralling our fears into a swarm of resistance. 
Not so many of us on the sidewalk that day.

Just a few fruit flies, persistent, annoying, 
doing what it takes to point out decay. 

Deborrah Corr is the author of the chapbook Naked Rib (Finishing Line Press). A former kindergarten teacher, she decided upon retirement to dedicate her time to the art and craft of poetry. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in several journals and anthologies, including The Penn Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, Booth, Verse Daily, The McNeese Review, Catamaran and many others. Deborrah lives in Seattle where she is inspired by gardening and morning walks with her husband. You can find her website at https://deborrahcorr.com/.

Photo credit: California Department of Fruit and Agriculture.

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 on our Give a Sawbuck page.

No Quarter

By Julie Gard

My partner and I attended a memorial service in small-town Wisconsin, and there were grayscale American flags all around us, on the hats and t-shirts of serious young men. I am familiar with the thin blue line flag, and of course the Confederate flag. But most popular now, among a crowd that isn’t mine, is this black and gray one stitched on caps and backpacks, printed on t-shirts, and pressed against pick-up truck windows.

I picture all the colors in the silky assortment of LGBTQ+ flags that young people wear like capes as I weave among them at Pride, the red orange yellow green blue purple black brown gray pink lavender mashups, and then this flag that is an X-ray, a drained-out opposite. It looks as if the American flag has rotted underwater for months in silty soil. It looks like something dug up, soaked in ink, seen faintly in the dark. It looks like lost hope. 

A little online research reveals that the black and gray flag means “take no prisoners.” No quarter—no lodging—will be provided to one’s enemies They will be killed rather than held captive. According to one merchant’s website, “The phrase ‘give no quarter’ has origins as far back as the 17th century. Our shirts run a little small and are athletic fit, so if you are in-between sizes or are unsure, please order up a size.” 

On Reddit, worthlesmeatbag says, “For me, it means ‘I’ll kill you if you fuck around,’” and a sub-comment reads, “I have one in my front yard. Agreed.” Someone else says to chill, that dark flags are tactical flags that identify nationality without drawing attention during combat. Anonymous describes them as “right wing, civil war coming” flags. One poster thinks they’re more stylish than the traditional red, white and blue, which look “dorky and old-fashioned because they’re so primary and bright.” Sabertooth2 agrees it’s a style choice, and also that it means if you fight, you’ll fight “until one side is completely dead.”

As we milled around at the funeral home, a man with a washed-out grayscale flag down the whole front of his t-shirt held his baby gently. He passed out tissues from a big, soft packet, including the one I cried into. After the service, my partner and I wandered down the block and into an open church. We moved among empty pews and stared up at art deco saints awash in luminescent smears of silver and pink, their bodies ending in teal and purple shoes. In the huge front window, sky blue glass was shot with light and increasingly translucent as the panes ascended, creating a sense of height and movement. By the door was a cross of red plastic roses for Mary, next to a small donation box. 

Across the street was another church, smaller but with a three-story tower and double front door. Every inch of this church had been painted matte black, except for the stone foundation, and its windows covered with boards. It was a negative of a church, above ground but buried, like a church after a fire. A couple of well-used but gleaming motorcycles were parked out front, next to a leafy, raised-bed vegetable garden. People gathered there, it struck me, not to praise but to prepare.

On the drive home, collapsing barns hoisted defiant, homemade banners. There are signs going up all around us. We need to know what they mean.

Julie Gard’s prose poetry collection I Think I Know You was a finalist for the Foreword INDIES Book Award in Poetry, and Home Studies won the New Rivers Press Many Voices Project Competition. Julie’s essays, stories, and poems have appeared in Axion, Clackamas Literary Review, Superstition Review, Blackbox Manifold, Inside Higher Ed, and other journals and anthologies. She lives and writes in Duluth, Minnesota and is Professor of Writing at the University of Wisconsin-Superior. Visit her website at www.juliegard.com.

Photo credit: Debbie Hall, poet, photographer, author and Writers Resist editor.

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

Two Poems by Erin Vaughn

Birthday

Yesterday at school,
a boy touched himself in front of you
his eyes unfocused
as if he was there and not there.
He looked right through you
and then your body was not your own.

Today you turned eleven
and shrieked through a throng of friends
who threw their arms around you
as you opened all your presents.
I wanted to cry because
I don’t know how to tell you
that this will happen again: men
will see you and not see you
over and over
and it takes a lot of light
to blow out all the candles
and still burn.

Things to Bring to the Protest

Bring your phone, locked.
Granola bar. ID.
A vial of your mother’s tears
and the sharp grey stone of your rage.
Bring all the joy you can find. Ball it up
in your hands like a fist.
Gather the shreds of your compassion
from where they’ve scattered about the house–
between the pages of books,
pots on the stove–and stuff your pockets.
Bring bandages and balm,
the small sleeping sounds of your brother’s
new baby, the wounded
song in your heart and the world it has lost.
These, together, are heavy.
Do not worry, beloved;
many hands lift here.

Erin Vaughn (she/her) is a poet and educator who writes in order to understand what it means to live freely—whether in a body, a family, or a country. She lives in Maryland with her husband, young daughter, and two dogs. Her poetry has been previously published in The Basilisk Tree.

Photo credit: Jenni Konrad via a Creative Commons license

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 on our Give a Sawbuck page.