prose poem – Writers Resist

I visited Gaza in my sleep

By Sophia Carroll

I worked in a medical tent. Do they still have medical tents? I’m not a doctor but in my dream, I could tell who we could save by touching them. Some people burned from infection. I knew we didn’t have medicine. I heard mothers scream, that sound that predates language. I hugged a boy of fourteen. He had no one. I wanted to take him home but that is impossible. Are we still free? He said he was coming back to fight, to avenge his family. I meant to birth a baby. Went to wash my hands and was suddenly in the kitchen of the house I grew up in, as if I could go back and forth like my money. As if I could wash my hands. They’re still dirty.

Sophia Carroll (she/they) is an analytical chemist and writer. Her work appears in wildness, SmokeLong Quarterly, Rust & Moth, and elsewhere. She is also the co-founder of M E N A C E, a magazine for the literary weird. Find her on Substack at Torpor Chamber and on Bluesky @torpor-chamber.bsky.social.

Photo by Damien Walmsley via a Creative Commons license.

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Week One

By Christine Junge

A rally the night before the inauguration is “laced with exaggerations and outright falsehoods.”*

I come home from a weekend away to find water leaking out the side of our house. Inside, water is pooling beneath the dishwasher. One more thing that’s falling apart.

An executive order instructs the government to end birthright citizenship. This constitutionally protected right says that children who are born on U.S. soil are citizens, even if their parents are not. The order is an attempt to rewrite our country’s founding document. I can only assume it won’t be the last.

I get a massage. Even though they have been prescribed to me for chronic pain, spa services feel indulgent at the best of times. Now? I spend the whole time thinking about the Mexican-American family I used to volunteer with. I have no idea about their immigration status.

How one of the police officers attacked on January sixth describes the pardoning of 1,600 January 6 rioters: “A miscarriage of justice, a betrayal, a mockery, and a desecration of the men and women that risked their lives defending our democracy.”*

My four-year-old son gets sent home from school with a fever. I have to cancel my doctor’s appointment, a lunch with a dear friend, my writing time, and the hour I would have spent scouring various newspapers and listening to NPR. Maybe this last piece isn’t a bad thing? I’m exhausted. It’s still day one.

“Mr. Musk, the world’s richest man, now has full command of the federal cost-cutting effort, which Mr. Trump has hailed as ‘potentially, ‘The Manhattan Project’ of our time.’”*

A handyman diagnoses our dishwasher leak as a faulty valve. Turns out the part is on backorder for months. A few weeks ago, I would have complained about this inconvenience. Now, I research McCarthyism, Nixon.

“Federal workers ordered to report on colleagues over D.E.I. crackdown.”*

I come to enjoy washing dishes, the warm water on my hands, the smell of soap, the ping of the water as it drips out of the drainboard into the sink. I guess I can get used to anything. Well, hopefully not.

“Even more than in his first term, President Trump has mounted a fundamental challenge to the norms and expectations of what a president can and should do. . . He intends to test the outer limits of what he can get away with.”*

I get trained to teach ESL. When I signed up, it felt like it would be a rewarding volunteer project. Now, doing something, anything, to help others feels urgent.

“No matter how small, quiet, or private the expression, art can move the needle in fighting for our collective freedom.”*

I read about art as resistance. I write this poem.

*Quoted from the New York Times

Christine Junge is a writer living in California, by way of Massachusetts and New York. She is currently working on a novel about grief, art, and the question of how well we really know those we love.

Photo credit: Photo by George Pagan III on Unsplash.

Love Letter to Chicago

By Dein Sofley

Cook County Citizens, I’m writing this letter to you on behalf of my friend Dein. She loves you and wants you to love her.

I’ve never been to Chicago, but I’ve heard that it’s windy: a working class city with a heart of gold. Home to Gwendolyn Brooks, Studs Terkel, Muddy Waters, Kanye West, Richard Wright, Chief Keef, Li-Young Lee, Common, Chance the Rapper, Haki Madhubuti and America’s forty-fourth president.

Dein is sorry she left you. Heartbroken. Confused. It took her 2,104 miles—through winking lights and gasoline, by time’s appetite and dismembered memories—to figure out that it wasn’t you she was afraid of; it was her feelings. Lost to be found, she came back to you on Valentine’s Day, her wayward tongue thirsty for the taste of your wounds and the words she has yet to earn. The Centennial Fountain marks the shape of returns.

Her body needs you. The arresting rush of your winds, the roar of your trains, the screams of your ambulances, the murmurs of your lake, the slap of your gun shots, the impatient footfalls, the spasms of car horns, the scent of cumin and skulking lilacs find the humming in her ribs. She’ll abandon sleep to breathe you in. In your noise, a love-in-answer. But how will you hear her?

Her: the class clown, the orphan, the shape shifter, always moving, famished for meaning, looking for ways to be real. A foundling in your sanctuary, she wants to serve your storied, buttressed, scavenged, policed city. Soothe her unrequited ache for home, Chicago, please; put her back together again. You people: your misfit blocks of dark skinned cousins, bushy Slavic uncles, lining waving yentas, the vendors selling StreetWise, the paleta man at 63^rd Street Beach, the kids rolling across the green at Foster, the Army of Moms patrolling Englewood, the polar bears who jump in the lake midwinter, daring death for vigor.

You lent her: Gina Frangello, Megan Steilstra, Kevin Coval, and Joe Meno.

She lent you: her daughter.

Your jazz scabbed streets of tribes: Mexican, Puerto Rican, Polish, Vietnamese, Palestinian, Indian, Pakistani, Swedish, Ukrainian, Israeli, that pull her out at night like an addict unable to name what she seeks through thrumming engines that collide with the babel of languages. Behind the sounds is another sound. And another.

Your long shouts of avenues: candy-colored storefronts, Beijing ducks roasting in windows, nail salons, tattoo parlors, dive bars, bathhouses, used goods, gold coasts, magnificent miles, dry cleaners and good burritos. All no-bullshit propositions that allow her to keep the criminal feeling of sovereignty.

The tavern sign says: “$2 Shot $4 Pints.” The grammar might be wrong, but she gets the message. This joint’s here for a shot and a beer and a six-pack to go because like her, you keep moving.

And you give: public parks, social policy, scholarships, cultural institutions.

And you take: seven hundred and forty-seven homicides last year.

If only she were bulletproof. When fear left and she said “I’ll make my home here.” She adopted a slew of stray cats, gathered her band of banshees, and stayed. She’ll fight for your honor. She’ll scrape away the narrative outliers made to her extinction. No sissies admitted.

Because in your winter mornings when she sees one neighbor shoveling another’s car out of the snow or a woman in hijab helping an old Russian man navigate the slippery sidewalk in route to the bus stop, mornings when the goodness of human beings shine, she feels herself triumphing.

Dein Sofley teaches Syrian refugees English at Albany Park Community Center. She earned her BA from Columbia College Chicago and is currently pursuing her MFA in fiction from UC Riverside’s low-residency program, where she also serves as nonfiction editor for The Coachella Review.

Photo credit: “Chicago Through a Cloud” by Roman Boed via a Creative Commons license.

First 100 Days: Recipe for Disaster

By Kelsey Maki

In a mixing bowl, combine three cups of intolerance with two cups of ignorance. Add one cup of charged rhetoric and two tablespoons of alternative facts. Stir until smooth. Pour into a bulletproof, non-stick pan.

Topping: In a separate bowl, combine one cup of self-satisfied sugar (GMO) and three cups of concern for corporate America. Add two tablespoons of coal slurry and a pinch of fracking wastewater.

Bake while you watch Hannity.
Let cool for ten minutes before serving.
Eat at your own risk.

Kelsey Maki writes travel articles, literary fiction, and magical realism. She is an English instructor at Brookdale Community College in New Jersey. Her fiction has appeared in Mosaics: A Collection of Independent Women—Volume I. Visit her website at kelseymaki.wix.com/Kelsey and check out her blog Syntax Surfing: A Sentence-Lover’s Blog about Books, at kmakiblog.wordpress.com/.