In case you didn't know Writers Resist celebrates each quarterly issue with a virtual reading, and you are invited to join us for this issue's gathering. Writers Resist Reads • Saturday 28 January 2023 • 5:00 p.m. PACIFIC Zoom information: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88356614245?pwd=a1FRMndJYzI3VzE1Ym9yZUU2ODhHdz09 Meeting ID: 883 5661 4245 Passcode: 247349 In the meantime, we know the world is [...]
By Christina Bagni after William Carlos Williams I have eaten the plums that were in the ice box and which you were probably relying on forever Forgive me you didn’t deserve them they were always mine to take Forgive me but the icebox was always meant to be empty it came that way and that’s [...]
By Jacqueline Jules “Gentleness and kind persuasion win where force and bluster fail.” —The North Wind and the Sun, Aesop The woman seated next to me on the plane, sees the star around my neck and begins asking questions. How can I be happy without eating ham? she wants to know. Or [...]
Black Listopia I feel like an idiom that drips from Baldwin’s pen “that” angry Black woman negotiating sin I AM NOT YOUR NEGRO! A thing to be had Thick lips, curvaceous hips, or a fashion fad You can’t set me like diamonds Or string me like pearls Pick on my afro, then appropriate my curls I [...]
By the Maenad There are four children playing on the playground below my office window. (The same one that was the target of a drive-by shooting a few weeks ago.) I heard the recognizable sounds of a familiar script being shouted and went to my window. No cops but The four children down there are [...]
By Tara Campbell The uterus is tired. The uterus is sorry but it can’t seem to stay in one place anymore, which isn’t surprising considering how often it’s been poked and prodded and pricked by congressmen’s pens. The uterus would like to get in a word of its own, just one, even edgewise just one [...]
By Yvonne Patterson bookended with blood, The Reaving Era births in the conflagration of Origin Crusades, subjugates the populace and banishes science, ending in funeral pyres of anti-pogrom riots: The Reclamation Years. closing scenes, unlike the exuberance of symphonic finales, manifest in discordant notes. bright allegros falter. sonorous glissades collapse in coarse staccato. dark notation [...]
By Karen Kilcup How do they do it— lift a heavy head and place the bomb beneath an ear? Slide the metal disc under a shoulder or thigh? Or worse: do they slice the swollen long-dead chest, flies fluttering, the stink unbearable, nearly? Do they carve a red-rimmed cavity large enough to implant the device, [...]
By Dotty LeMieux The gun tucked neatly in the large man’s waist I avoid his stare, move slowly, lock the door I move slowly out the door Cap pistol held at the ready The gun moves out in the large man’s hand Children run fast across the lawn I cross the lawn going pop pop [...]
By Lisa Brand They only told me to smile, like they know what that means. It’s time to show you who I am. . . . It’s scary, isn’t it? I show some teeth and suddenly you’re all over me like an animal, I should have bared my teeth, I’m not the person that you [...]
By Samy S. Swayd don't drink from this dripping cracked cup, for it’s my own heart— my beats poured into words for broken lines, making this page perplexing and pale. but if you take a taste, you must sail with a deep breath and an active mind, and paint a spirited sign to remind you [...]
By Kathy Kremins "I sat with my anger long enough until she told me her real name was grief." – C.S. Lewis We are better than this No, we are this Always have been Columbus mission schools Tulsa Race Massacre Charlottesville La Operacion children in cages smallpox pipelines voter suppression We are better than [...]
By Livvy Krakower “The Manic Pixie Dream Girl exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures.” – Nathan Rabin When Sunny was eight years old her mother fell down the stairs. That doesn’t seem important now as you sit [...]
By William Palmer What happened January 6 was forgettably minor, the most popular Fox host claimed on June 9, the first night of the House Select Committee’s Report, so forgettably minor he did not allow any commercials during his show, decreasing the chances viewers might stray, or might consider the view that what had happened [...]
By Holly A. Stovall Until the paper that Joelle Cantrell wrote made it to the top of my stack of To Kill a Mockingbird essays to grade for sophomore English at Jackson High, I had been eating clean and feeling good. I was slouching deep into the couch, a pint of Clean Cream sugar-free-non-fat frozen balanced [...]
