Melissa Rendlen
We March

Women marched on Washington
more than five hundred thousand members strong.
You may have heard.
My eldest, Marietta and I were there.
We marched five days after her sister’s wedding,
in Texas.
Marietta flew to home to Seattle on Tuesday, Chicago on Wednesday.
I didn’t go home, flew to Chicago and met her there,
We hopped a train at six pm, Chicago to DC.
There were Trump hats on the train, but more pink pussy hats on board.
A picture of all pink hatted in the observation car, published in the New York Times.

We stayed in Pentagon City, twenty minutes on Metro to the Mall.
At least it was on the 20th…
That day we went to the Smithsonian.
Saturday morning the Metro station swarming.
Signs of all sizes, pink hats, old women, young women, gay guys, straight guys,
mothers, fathers, daughters and sons.
Forty minutes just to board, three hours more to the mall.
From every direction pink tentacles undulating toward Third and Independence Ave.

Joy danced across the air, bounced from breast to breast, circled around and lifted you off the ground.
We wove and dove through ever tightening crowds until we could move no more.
We never saw the stage, couldn’t understand the loud speaker, but stood for hours
packed together
singing, chanting, chatting.
A six year old on her daddy’s shoulders, held her homemade unicorn sign that said girl power.
Every direction all she could see was people shoulder to shoulder, front to back, sharing the cel-ebration.

Black, white, Hispanic, Muslim, Christian, Jew, old, young happy in our collective purpose.
A we with people on every continent, including Antarctica’s entire population.
All of us just wanted to say:

Love is love
Black lives matter
Climate change is real
Immigrants make America Great
Women’s rights are human rights.

Melissa Rendlen is a 66 year old poet physician, recently returned to her love of writing. She was a Tupelo Press 30/30 Project poet, received Honorable Mention with her first attempt at a chapbook in Concrete Wolf’s chapbook contest, and has had poems in GFT: Press, Still Crazy, Ink in Thirds, L’emphemere, and Writing Raw.

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Aimee Herman
Dear America,

This isn’t about Canada, though I can’t pretend she’s not on my mind these days. You’ve made mistakes before:
dance crazes I couldn’t wrap my hips around
North Carolina, your ridiculous obsession with who uses your bathrooms
too many guns
your disregard for the need for free education
Sarah Palin

Now I’m screaming out my safe word because it’s just too much to bear:

Passport

Aimee Herman is the author of the poetry collections meant to wake up feeling (great weather for MEDIA, 2014), The Body Electric (CreateSpace, 2013), and to go without blinking (BlazeVOX, 2012). Aimee’s poems have appeared in journals including cream city review and BOMB and in the anthology Troubling the Line: Trans Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics. Nightboat Books, 2013). Aimee is a queer writer, performance artist, and writing/literature teacher at Bronx Community College.

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Devon Balwit
Beautiful and Terrible

The wind, while not quite gale force,
is close enough.

It hurtles across the sky to the right margin,
dragging clouds

and cracking trees, a violence oddly wafting
hyacinth

and apple blossom, for it is April. We pull
the dog out

just as a trunk topples at our feet. Our neighbor,
a woodsman,

fetches his chainsaw to lop the branches
and free us.

Devon Balwit‘s poems have appeared in The NewVerse News, Poets Reading the News, Redbird Weekly Read, Emerge Literary Journal, Rat’s Ass Review (Such an Ugly Time), Rise-Up Review, Unlikely Stories Mark V! and more.

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Soraya Shalforoosh
Humpty Will Fail

The flag smells like dollar bills
The dollar signs smells like cement and steel
The cement and steel smells like blood and mud
The blood and mud smells like landfill,
Swamp muck
The swamp monster wears heavy cologne and cheap ties
Tapes them shut with billion dollar scotch tape
The scotch is gold
He snorts it and stalks our sleep—night terrors spread across this land and after three weeks of sweats, clenched heart and screams, my friends tell me the same is happening to them, the same is happening to their coworkers the same is happening to our cousins, to our neighbors, to our teachers, to our doctors, to our prophets, even therapists break silences and have had it too pounding arms rests. Post-it note-filled subways, protest board lined streets, pinks hats on the heads of us like flowers defying snow in spring, marches feet hurt, brains constantly trying to figure out, how and why
Collectively
Our hearts panic and recover
Panic and recover

My couch, I am there with my son, cuddle, warmth prevails as we watch Harry Potter, the Dark Lord and the Death Eaters take over Hogsworth, I keep searching for more messages through Potter, through fables, and folklore how do they banish Voldemort? I study the film more carefully,
My son wants to know if we can make spells, yes we can, we can

Humpty will fall
Humpty will fail
Humpty will wail

The emperor’s daughter’s new line of clothes is for sale
Her dresses smell like boarding school
And the boarding school smells like white privilege
White privilege smells like baloney and reams of blank paper
The blank paper is ready for counterfeit
Rubles, Pounds, dollars and bitcoins
The cash smells
Decaying capitalism wrapped in a flag

Soraya Shalforoosh is the author of This Version of Earth (Barrow Street, 2014). She has been a featured poet in the Journal of the Academy of American Poets Emerging Poet Series, and has had poems and reviews in Black Earth Institute, Apogee Journal, Taos Journal, Barrow Street, Lumina Journal, Skanky Possum, and Marlboro Review, among others. She hold an MFA in Creative Writing from the New School and as an undergraduate at Clark University won first place in the Prentiss Cheney Hoyt Poetry award. She has been a guest poet at William Paterson University in New Jersey, Berkeley College in New York, San Jose State University and a guest speaker at the American Embassy in Algeria.

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Devi S. Laskar
from State of the Art, State of the Union

10. The tally miscounted

Not like it was Chinese takeout on a faulty phone line
with fifty people talking in the background. According
to the prophets and the fortune-tellers, the flies and frogs
were supposed to kick-start the end of times. Yet the talking
heads on TV were still smiling, pointing out in soothsayer
voices that not all seven plagues had visited. And the order
was wrong. First came the short-horned grasshoppers, locusts
really. Then a lengthy eclipse which some took to mean
the starting line for eternal darkness, but scientists
explained it away along with the Periodic Table and Darwin’s
Theory of Evolution. No flies, just fat-bellied frogs. No rivers
of blood, just ribbons of red dust and clay exposed from
the droughts, no death of first-born children except at the hands
of world war, road rage and ethnic cleansing, drunkenness.
It did rain for forty days and hail, but after the fire was already out.

Devi S. Laskar is the author of Gas & Food, No Lodging (Finishing Line Press, 2017). Her poems have appeared in The Raleigh Review and other journals. She holds an MFA from Columbia University and an MA in South Asian Studies from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She lives in California.

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Sarah Sala
The News

Today federal officials apprehended
an undocumented brain tumor
and transported her to a detention center.

45 declared: We’re getting really bad dudes
out of this country. And at a rate that nobody’s
ever seen before. And they’re the bad ones.

For weeks, my brain crashed through the waterblack
basement of alternate galaxies before coming
to a halt on my pillow.

This tumor and I, we share the same name.
You have a beautiful brain, my neurologist beamed.
A printout of alpha waves trailed across his legs.

See that gap? That’s where you blinked!
In the Old French, to deport is to be patient.
What is language, but the genesis of crime?

45’s vice his tongue: to drive out by order.
I feel dizzy, with pain. Heavy eyes. Nausea.
The tongue is not always responsive.

Sarah Sala is the author of The Ghost Assembly Line (Finishing Line Press , 2016). Her poem “Hydrogen” was recently featured in the “Elements” episode of NPR’s hit show Radiolab in collaboration with Emotive Fruition. Sarah’s poems appear in Atlas Review, The Stockholm Review of Literature, and Poetry Ireland Review, among others. Visit her at SarahSala.com

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