Writing is an act of resistance
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The Whale
By Kerry Loughman never budged becalmed she was bleached by sun & beached on relentless rise of blue water liquid leeched from her eyes her orifices her great mouth agape her lungs did evaporate Climate-changed her wishes drowned in sand Kerry Loughman is a retired educator and photographer living in the Boston…
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Two Poems by Linda Parsons
How a Woman Becomes Herself When the neighbor’s weed tree drapes over the power lines and shades her garden, she contemplates going out by moonlight to dump salt on the roots—but that could backfire and flow instead into the garden, be its ruination. These good neighbors invite her over for fine smoked brisket and can’t…
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Disappearing Into the Flesh Market VII
By Mary Stebbins Taitt Artist’s statement: This painting, part of a series, is a resistance statement against the misuse of girls, boys, women, and others by flesh markets of prostitution, child pornography, and sex trafficking. The first painting in the series was a response in oils to an art installation by Tyree Guyton at Detroit’s Heidelberg…
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Wildness Unafraid
By Tim Murphy What if trees could talk? No. Of course they do. What if we could hear them speak just beneath our feet? What if birds of all feathers who lift the sky with song and frame it with flight told us what names to call them? What if we could simply bathe in…
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Suburban Median
By Myna Chang We see the body on the way to drop our kids off at school. It’s in the median at the Parkway stoplight. We don’t recognize what it is, at first. Understanding comes in pieces: leg, arm, slender foot. Naked, of course. We try to look away. But is it someone we…
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Wrong Rainbow
By L. Acadia Describing our droomhuis for Dutch class, my worksheet filled with my dream house’s garden: Hollyhocks, hydrangea higher than I, wrought iron table for morning coffee, serenading birds, frogs ringing a pond. My love wrote an interior my mind couldn’t fit: puppy-claw impervious tile floors, dormer bedroom, dinner-party primed kitchen, postprandial dancing…
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Two Poems by Deborah Hochberg
climate change, hope, climate crisis, Deborah Hochberg, water rights, home, nature reclaimed, extreme weather events, PoetryCongregation of Ibis “A barrage of storms has resurrected what was once the largest body of fresh water west of the Mississippi River, setting the stage for a disaster this spring.” – from “Tulare Lake Was Drained Off the Map. Nature Would Like a Word,” Soumya Karlamangla and Shawn Hubler, New York Times, April…
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what happened before the good sex
By Bryana Joy for God’s sake no more games she said setting the last set of lace panties in the trash i am befuddled by all this rigmarole this muddle this hullabaloo she threw a negligee out the door and all of her lipstick tubes i am i the only one you are you…
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that name
By William Palmer tide in— imagine waves scraping away that name and the lies upon lies that feed off it, dissolving them in foam imagine the mugshot gone the blue suits gone the long red ties around our country’s neck gone William Palmer’s poetry has appeared recently in JAMA, J Journal, One Art,…