Writing is an act of resistance
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Numbers
By Michal Rubin Mohammed, Wadia, two brothers Ala Asous, Hazaa, Rami, Ahmed, four brothers six cousins Rizkallah, seventh cousin, one missile, hundred shards of glass, one ambulance, one mass funeral, one village, one sleepless night at Muthalath al-Shuhada I wish my body moved, shook the numbers off, 22452600 my passport number, two, Yehoshua and…
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Baptism
By Shieva Salehnia The fountain in the middle of Washington Square Park has not always been there, just as I have not always been here standing next to it. In the middle of the park, I climb inside the edge of the fountain’s lips. I lean back against them, cool slick stone. The bubbling…
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Inside the Serotonin Industrial Complex
Dick Westheimer, consumerism, cultural industrial complex, neocolonialism, Poetry, prison industrial complex, mass incarcerationBy Dick Westheimer “The only winning move is not to play.” —from the movie War Games “You can’t call it anything else. It’s just slavery.” —Calvin Thomas, who spent more than 17 years at the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, Louisiana, working the fields and cattle processing facilities as part of his terms of…
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Welcome to Amplified Voices, a Special Issue of Writers Resist
Writers Resist, anti-war poetry, anti-conflict poetry, Amplified Voices, anti-war writing, anti-conflict writing, conflict zone writingSince the Vietnam War, violent conflict has been made visible to even the least likely victims—on televisions, then phones, now raging across social media—and its representations are laden with passionate opinions, well-informed and not. From politicians and universities around the globe to PEN America to Oscar Awards speeches, emotionally bloody conflict about conflict reigns over…
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From the Editor of Amplified Voices
By DW McKinney These words—the ones in this note and the ones in this issue—are difficult to write. Do not look away from them. Let them sink into you. I am writing this editor’s note after I have seen a father carry his son, blown to pieces, in a yellow bag, and I fought…
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They Are All Terrorists
Narrative nonfiction, Amplified Voices, anti-war writing, anti-conflict writing, Lori Yeghiayan Friedman, terrorismBy Lori Yeghiayan Friedman is what my (now long-dead) mother used to say to the TV news reports of the bombings, beheadings, settlements, kidnappings, hijackings, imprisonments, killings―the latest eruptions of violence in a region far away, part of a war my mother fled with her family decades earlier. She said it while sitting in…
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Two Poems by Saheed Sunday
a daggerpoint & what is salvation if not how we give our body to beauty to the memory of what does not rust —Othuke Umukoro the Sunday before this one, the catechist warned about hellfire and its odor of smoky taste. he said it would come unto us like the clouds, breaking off whatever…
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Caught in the Crossfire of a Madding Crowd
By J.D. Harlock caught in the crossfire of a madding crowd, the child runs into the arms of her mother and nestles herself ‘neath a limp arm drenched in blood, dreading the glare of the machine that scans the corpses of the agitators that dared to disturb the order it was programmed to maintain,…
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Gauze
By Lisa Suhair Majaj when you learn that “gauze” comes from Gaza you will begin to understand how light passing through translucent fabric illuminates the delicate porous openings between threads that interweave to allow molecules of air and light to flow from one place to another without blockade or border, and you will learn…