Writing is an act of resistance
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Nobody Likes Spock
By Sarah Colón Spock scrolls through his Facebook feed in the early hours of the morning. He hasn’t been sleeping well, and the blue light from his phone shining upward reveals dark circles around his eyes. Today, someone is posting a long description of the origins of the virus. “PROOF that it was created…
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Post-Election Meltdown
By Marcella Remund I am 60 years old. In my lifetime, my mother’s lifetime, and all the lifetimes that came before, no woman has been president. Don’t tell me to get over it I have TRAINED blonde footballers for jobs I couldn’t get without a penis, jobs that paid ten times my single-mom salary.…
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A Friability Test
By Kimutai Allan You can try muzzling the press and stifling healthy discourse. They are actions, easy. It’s a different tale down in our hearts. You can’t break us. We aren’t as friable as your petty thoughts deem. Kimutai Allan is an emerging Kenyan writer. His works have been published previously by The Active…
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Reading Aloud in Kidjail
By Jill McDonough The boys in my local juvie want to work one on one, write stories, poems, mark up the stuff I give them. More than one kid at a time’s less fun: more fussing, more holding back to show how tough they are. When one of them writes on the other’s paper…
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The Notorious
By Alex Penland Do you remember Yad Vashem? How the path that leads you through the exhibit is chronological and single lined, each point presented on a hair pin turn of events: here is where a new legislation was passed, here is where some diplomat died, here is where the people thought oh, one…
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Contingency Plans
Presidential Election, family separation, concentration camps at the border, post-election chaos, Sara Marchant, racism, EssayBy Sara Marchant My husband recently retired. His anxiety had increased over the last four years (whose hasn’t, right?) and a few months ago he was having a bad day at work, when he abruptly stood up, announced, “I retire,” and walked out the door. It’s been an adjustment. At first, he didn’t know…
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Target Practice
police shootings, institutionalized racism, Jericho Brown, Black Lives Matter, Poetry, #BLM, Geoffrey PhilpBy Geoffrey Philp After Jericho Brown I ride around this city feeling as if I’m always a target, like the one at a gun range where cops used mug shots of African-American men to improve the shots of their snipers—photos of black men who weren’t dead, but whose images would be useful to kill…
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I Manage My Dread of the Election by Reading About the Eradication of Murder Hornets
By Debbie Hall In November we inched closer to the ledge over which one only falls once. —Mary Jo Bang One definition of dread (noun): great fear in view of impending evil. As a verb, it can mean to be in shrinking apprehension of. Derived terms include: dreadable, dreadly, and dreadworthy, as in: the…
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Sing the Songs of Our Youth
By Kit-Bacon Gressitt 24 October 2020 Uncle Jack died this morning. The stroke, the collapse, the surprise mass on his brain? Whichever or all, at least he went faster than Aunt Peggy and Mother. Not as fast as Father—the gift of a heart attack. The comparison? I don’t know, perhaps it’s a futile attempt to…