JOHNNY DEPP WINS, AND I, LIKE SO MANY OTHERS, THINK OF THE MAN WHO ABUSED ME

by Emma Rhodes

I’m in a courtroom with him in my dreams.

Years live, tangible and growing inside of me.

Stench rotting from the inside out makes me gag, and

the judge thinks I drink and doesn’t believe a word I say.

 

As things rot, their appearance, smell, stories change. 

Leave something to fester long enough it becomes absence, 

memories warp but sickness remains. 

 

We beg you to believe our guts even when they stink.

 

There is a constant drip on the windshield of this car. The evidence is shown 

through the screen so it’s water-warped & memory-warped & 

dream-warped but he doesn’t deny a thing

 

The jury appreciates his honesty, his charm. 

 

Court takes a break. He says we need to play laser-tag—the judge said so. 

That can’t be true and yet suddenly I’m shot by light from all angles, 

put me under a spotlight and call me a liar.

 

The water continues to drip on the windshield.

 

They tell me I had the means to get out. Look at me now. Just drive away they say. Just drive away if it was so bad why didn’t you leave but facing the other wall is a boot on the wheel and I am stuck in his bed, his bathtub, pacing the one single hallway while he left in a car to see 

 

his parents (who are so proud of him, by the way. He was always a great boy.)

 

And Taylor Swift hasn’t said anything this time, none of the #MeToo baddies have spoken.

The water on the windshield breaks through and shatters. 

Glass shards in the courtroom. Everyone yells 

 

“violence!”

 

And I am left. Picking up one shard after another. He walks by, stomps on a shard so it crumbles into a million more (another inconsistency), says 

 

“thanks for keeping me around.”

 

I’ll stop writing about violence when I stop seeing it. 

I’ll stop writing about violence when the world stops trying to kill its women.  

Emma Rhodes is an emerging Queer writer currently living on the unceded territory of the Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee people. Her work has been published in places such as Prism International, Plenitude, Riddle Fence, and elsewhere.

GIRLS SAY YES

Poem for Veterans Day

by Sandra Anfang

Pictured L to R: Joan Baez, Pauline Baez Marden, Mimi Farina in this 1968 poster, from a Jim Marshall photograph, promoting draft resistance during the Vietnam War. Source: National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution

to boys who say no.

The words ring hollow

in my ears like a looped refrain

from a scratched LP

a not-so-distant memory.

 

Aligned with the movement

I nodded and signed on. I never

gave my body—much less

heart—to a man in uniform, unless he worked

in the service of people, animals, or trees.

 

But what about the other war

the one that ogled us

from leering unshaved faces

from portraits on greenbacks

from slave ships and pedophile priests?

 

Blissfully unaware of the battle

that raged behind clenched teeth

we sailed along, soothed by the

waters of our beliefs, decades

before our lips would shape the words me too.

Sandra Anfang is the author of three poetry collections and her work has been published in numerous journals. She's also a visual artist, editor, poetry teacher in the schools, and host of a long-running poetry series. She lives in Northern California, where she looks for good trouble every day.

DOWN

by Joan Halperin

"King Gone" by Michael Ramirez on Twitter.

Watch him step down, taking with him

the taste of a stolen kiss, an unwelcome hug, resting

in his back pocket with the obligatory silk handkerchief

and a long list of "the way things used to be."

Oh for the days when a man could slide

his hand over a woman's backside,

brush against a breast, whisper profanities

into a perfumed ear. When did these flowers

become so uppity? And how did he fall,

splat on the hard earth while holding tight

to the way life used to be? 

Joan Halperin has been published in Confrontation, New York Quarterly, Blue Unicorn, and others. Until retirement, she was a Poet in the Schools in Westchester County and also a Poet-in- Public Service. She now lives in Orchard Cove, a continuing care community in Canton Ma. where she continues to teach, write, and keep in touch with grandchildren. Her oldest grandchild Hanna Halperin has just had Something Wild, her first novel, published to rave reviews.

THE WOMAN CARD

by Skaidrite Stelzer

Too hard to say the exact words,
the exacting words.
How a hand can be placed on a shoulder;
the sudden shudder of his breath in my hair.
Because I don’t know him really,
a stranger,
and I don’t like men creeping up behind me.
Because they can’t see my face,
they may feel they are gentlemen,
they may think me too sensitive,
easy to melt,
quietly.
Easy to melt with my mouth closed,
tongue removed,
unless his in my ear.
Such close whispering meant
only to reassure me
and the chorus arising,
overpowering.
What is the risk?
I remember the man
who followed me home one night
from the laundromat
and I did not mind it.
But another night
he came in accidentally.
My accident, not locking the door.
There is often something more
to the story.
If you want to touch me,
at least look me straight
in the face.

Skaidrite Stelzer lives and writes in Toledo, Ohio.  Growing up as a post-war refugee and displaced person, she feels connected to the world and other stray planets.  Her poetry has been published in Fourth River, Eclipse, Glass, Baltimore Review, and many other literary journals as well as TheNewVerse.News.

AN AWKWARD AGE

by Wayne Scheer

Hugs were rare where I grew up,
reserved for mother/son greetings
and father/daughter consoling.
I don't recall seeing
either of my parents hugging
a friend or each other, for that matter.
To the day he died,
my father and I shook hands.

My wife, on the other hand,
probably hugged the doctor at birth.
And after years of standoffishness,
she taught me to open up
and hug friends, male and female.

Yesterday, at an art museum.,
we met a friendly young couple
who live a couple houses down from us.
My wife went in for hugs
while I shook the man's hand
and proudly moved to hug the young woman.

As I opened my arms
I saw she had extended her right arm for a handshake,
a member of Pelosi's straight arm club, I presume,
but it was too late,
and it resulted in an awkward half hug.

Now that I finally learned to hug,
I have to relearn, like Joe Biden, that hugs
aren't always welcomed,
that I need to wait, momentarily,
for the woman to signal
how much of her personal space
she's willing to give up.

As Joe said, I get it.
But please forgive the awkwardness
while I adjust.


Wayne Scheer is an old codger trying to stay relevant. He has been nominated for four Pushcart Prizes and two Best of the Nets. He's published numerous stories, poems and essays in print and online, including Revealing Moments, a collection of flash stories. His short story, “Zen and the Art of House Painting” has been made into a short film.

A VALEDICTION: FORBIDDING COWARDICE

by Pamela Sumners

Daughter, bear the slights of the petty with grace
and aplomb.  The porcelain smile on your face
will write of itself the pretty words
they’ll choose for your tomb, recording
that you chose your battles well.
The rest can fight it out in hell.

My lesson is let plebe and patrician alone.
There’s no sport in baiting the very dumb,
and you’ll never beat either for influencing
the tilt of the world tilting at windmills—
The stupid are beyond convincing,
and the rich won’t roll away your stone.

Mind the manner, not the honor of your word.
Ungreased candor only blunts the sword.
And courage was made for the cupboard.
This world, if no mild place, is the hoard
of the meek.  Shh, my girl, don’t speak.

Mind your pusillanimous p’s, querulous cues.
The world builds altars to the timorous
who are generous in their alliances,
who have the temerity to putsch defiance
and study popularity as a science.
Bite on verity as you would a bullet
at an amputation without ether
and every polarity of man’s universe
will verily reverse God’s curse
and laud your jocularity.

The meek earned their own beatitude,
won an earth unscorched by thoughts either
deep or divisible, whose worth
is wreaked out in platitudes.
Apocalypse alone is birthed by temper.
Our creation is just a whine and whimper.
Stepchild Truth is no Big Bang, just a birthing
pang orphaned by jackboot ingratitude.

Voltaire knew the law of gratuities we ply:
Live long enough to enrage the actuaries
calculating your annuities.  Me,
I’d vouch for the mealy-mouthed backroom
schemer who perches where opportunism knocks,
flattering the acuity of his sense-shorn flocks.
Don’t slouch!  Lurch!  Pluck out the eye
too discerning.  By all means be of use—
a churched diplomat, and, if must be, obtuse.
The strong man may covet your ox or your ass,
but it’s the dullard sheep who reaps the grass.



Author’s Note: I wanted to say a word to the mufflers of women who want them to be ornamental and compliant. That has been much on display of late.


Pamela Sumners is a constitutional and civil rights lawyer who has glared at Roy Moore, Jay Sekulow, Bill Pryor, and various Alabama governors across courtrooms. She also was the longest-serving executive director of Missouri's NARAL affiliate and has litigated numerous sexual harassment and discrimination cases. She now lives in St. Louis with her wife, teenage son, and three dogs who watch crime shows and sleep all day.

GIRLS JUST WANT TO HAVE ENJOYMENT

by Diane Elayne Dees

Click here to see original tweet.

So many things we could be doing—
watching movies, walking dogs,
playing with kids, lying on the beach,
having coffee with friends, playing tennis
on Saturday, relaxing at a jazz club.
But none of these can compare
with remembering, reliving, retelling:
the hug turned sinister, the doctored
drink, the sound of fabric being ripped,
the feel of bruising hands on shoulders,
the sound of laughter, the vomit-inducing
kiss, the heavy breathing, noxious sweat,
the brutal violation so powerful—
our neurology may never be the same.
The pleasure center of the female brain
lights up with every opportunity to beg
a powerful man to listen, to understand,
to maybe—one day—actually give a damn.

Diane Elayne Dees’s poems have been published in many journals and anthologies. Diane, who lives in Covington, Louisiana, also publishes Women Who Serve, a blog that covers women’s professional tennis throughout the world.

2018

by Ashley Green

Let’s talk about it.


Twelve and
the twenty-year-old touching
the back of your leg
where the shorts ended and your thigh began.

Thirteen and
the stucco pulling hair
from the back of your head and scraping
the backs of your arms
as his eighteen-year-old body
crushed you and
his hands pushed your legs open. 


Sixteen and
your classmate crawling
up your dazed, drunk body
unbuttoning your pants and
telling you
it’s okay.

Eighteen and
the boy you loved
forcibly turning you over
his grunts and moans
made you nauseous and
the pain of him inside you
made you cry.

Twenty and
 your neighbor corners you
 in his room and
tells you that you can’t leave
so you beg and
push and
cry and
his arms outstretch around you, caging you in.

Let’s talk about it and
 talk about it and
 talk about it until
 we are out of breath.
Let’s tell the world how
you bent our bodies and
bruised our skin and
made us bleed and
stole from us and
how we are still here
to talk about it.

Let’s talk about it.



Ashley Green lives in Southern California where she is surrounded by brilliant women.

HE TOO

by James Cronin




Who could expect they’d get it right,
as if the crimes weren’t crimes before?
From couch to floor, to any site,
each claims she chose, and asked for more.

Rich men, power, office as hotel,
the scene was set so long ago.
Does beauty lust for age? In hell.
Some drugs, of course, to make it go.

Novice trust sets a satyr’s ease,
then a forceful push to get his fun.
From “seduce” to “rape,” a few degrees,
too dark to tell when all is done.

Moguls, solons and comics may
regret they let their morals skive.
Shame might not be enough today,
when indictments and the cuffs arrive.

The days of grace, of men to men,
are gone thank God and here’s the pitch:
found guilty, you’re in jail and then,
whose turn is it to play the bitch?

James Cronin facilitates a course in the art of the short story for The Second Half, a lifelong learning institute in Fall River, MA. His first book of poetry World of Shadows is scheduled to be published this summer by The Poetry Loft Press of Cranston, RI.

ME TOO WHO

by Rebecca Street

How can it be a little lass of nine

Should feel such guilt and fear the threat of hell?

Too young to name his cruelty a crime

Too damaged and coerced to ever tell.

Me too

Time’s up

So what

Shut up

Rosy cheeked girl who works to find a way

For her sweet child to have a better life

Could not afford to lose her job that day

Besides her mother’s cousin is his wife.

Me too

Time’s up

So what

Shut up

The bashful boy with pimples on his face

Could run like lightening so his coach did say

This dear one’s "yes sir" followed every race

With sleepless nights and silent tears by day.

Me too

Time’s up

So what

Shut up

Will justice for the few forever reign

While numerous nameless suffer such pain?

Rebecca Street is the author of You Can Help: A Guide for Family & Friends of Survivors of Sexual Abuse and Assault and the online program for survivors You Are Not Alone. She is also an actor and a poet. She has addressed both lay people and professionals at a wide variety of venues including the NY Office of Mental Health, the Fordham Graduate School of Social Work, and the University of CA., Santa Barbara. On April 4, she will be the keynote speaker for "Take Back The Night" at The Juilliard School.

PARADISE THEATER 1936

by Marie G. Fochios

Photograph by Erik Ravelo from his 2013 sequence “Los Intocables” (“The Untouchables") featuring a variety of issues plaguing children around the world. “The right to childhood should be protected,” Ravelo writes.

Movie house where splicing comes unglued
And the malignant image
Repeats itself again and again and again
Indecent as a pistol shot penetrating,
Entering a random target.

Fumbling, he grabs the child’s hand,
Pressing down.
Only the darkness and the voices and the shadows
Conceal the agony
The hardening into a freeze frame.
Encrypted for life
Until . . .
#MeToo

Marie  G. Fochios lives in New York City and taught in the New York public school system for over 30 years. She studied poetry at The New School with Pearl London.

I LOVE A PARADE

by Linda Ferguson

as spontaneous as kissing,
one that opens like skies and camellias in January,
one that’s snug as the petals of artichoke buds,
one as knock-kneed as newly born calves in the spring.

I love a parade that knows the way, like elephants returning to a stream,
or a parade without purpose, one that drifts along, trailing its fingers in a summer lake,
or one that’s as wistful as the hound with its nose pressed
against the rough grain of gray fence planks.

Let’s have a parade that gleams like the keys that open the hidden doors,
or like the intrepid turtles that continue to carry small polished maps of the world –
a parade that smells of peaches and petrichor and pine –
a parade that surprises, like the sight of your name, handwritten in ink,
on a cream envelope.

Let’s have a barefoot, makeshift parade made of pinecones and popsicle sticks and twine –
a red-wagon parade, with wheels that squeak and trumpets that strain and ponies that canter
along crooked brick streets.

Give us a piggy-back, leapfrog, hopscotch parade –
a parade of acorns and feathers and beads,
a parade of thick knitted socks and worn wooden clogs,
a parade with spider web streamers and twig batons
covered in clumps of fresh emerald moss.

Let’s have a parade of flags stitched with verbs
like gentle and shimmy and billow and mist
or humble signs printed with pudding and pillow
and button and bone and apple and toe—

Let’s see a parade of dazed passengers stepping off a plane
into a long embrace,
a parade of soldiers lifting their palms,
a parade of perpetrators asking forgiveness,
a parade of jurors confessing, I, too, have sinned,  
a parade of ancestors promising, it will be alright.

Come, let our parade know the beams of a blue supermoon,
let our parade know the loneliness of being lost at sea—
let our parade be the one that remembers
how footprints tremble when they touch
foreign soil.

Linda Ferguson is an award-winning writer of poetry, fiction and essays. Her poetry chapbook was published by Dancing Girl Press. She has a passion for teaching creative writing classes that inspire and support students of all ages.

DRIVEN THRU

by Deirdre Fagan

When you are 13 and poor,
even Taco Bell has an allure.

The Monte Carlo that held us

had a sheepskin bench seat.


Its soft cover like a fitted sheet
curving its corners like a cloud.

Seatbelts weren’t worn in 1983;

no need for slits to let safety peer in.



“Come closer and you can steer,” you said.


Nearly half my current size, no breasts,
thighs the width of my current calves—

I leaned full-bodied into the drive

eyes on the road, mouth watering,

drive-thru beckoning.

(What is there to taking a young girl?)

Deirdre Fagan is a widow, wife, and mother of two who has published poetry, fiction, and nonfiction in Amaryllis, Eunoia Review, and Poetry Breakfast, among others.  She is also the author of Critical Companion to Robert Frost and has published a number of critical essays. Fagan teaches literature and writing at Ferris State University where she is also the Coordinator of Creative Writing.  

A STORM IN A TEACUP

by Alina Rios

Storm by Juliana Coutinho

Darkness dances
at the bottom of my tea cup,
darker than my Earl Grey amber—
a storm if you read the signs.

The Getty shuts its eyes to the fire-
and-smoke-breathing beast
awakened by Santa Anas.

A man on a bridge in Kentucky
takes his life to the chorus of #metoos
kept silent too long.

A madman at the wheel
of my adopted country’s beat-up bus
drives through hurricanes
and political theater, losing people,
as if the bus’s bottom were his hands,
child’s clumsy hands,
and we’re sand flowing through
into the anonymous
forever of the beach.

Nobody sleeps. Or
nobody sleeps well.
We wake in the night
from dreams of buildings falling,
weapon-wielding children, dead-ends.

The air is electric, Christmas cheer
not a match for it.
If you’re awake, you know. The crows know.
They gather murders over the Capitol.

My tea is cold and darker now.
I drink it up.


Alina Rios is an immigrant and a dreamer. She spent the first part of her life in St. Petersburg, Russia, and now lives in Seattle with her 9-year old son and a ghost-cat. Her poetry has appeared in CrossWinds Poetry Journal, Camroc Press Review, Rust and Moth, and other fine places. She is the Editor-in-Chief of Bracken Magazine.

A CHRISTMAS SONNET

by Cally Conan-Davies

Aleksander Reed "Alek" Skarlatos is an American actor and Oregon Army National Guardsman specialist who, along with fellow Americans Spencer Stone and Anthony Sadler, a Briton and two Frenchmen, stopped a gunman on a Paris-bound train travelling from Amsterdam via Brussels in August 2015. He has been awarded the United States Army Soldier's Medal from U.S. President Barack Obama, and has received France's highest decoration, the Legion of Honour, from French president François Hollande as well as the medal of Arras, France. Skarlatos competed on season 21 of ABC's Dancing with the Stars with pro dancer Lindsay Arnold (pictured), and finished in third place.

I won't let the good men go unsung
Good men throw their bodies on the lives
of their mothers and their children and their wives
and the unknown. Good men don't die alone

Each day this year, my soul has been punched and stunned
by bullet-men ripping through the dance we do
by bully-men raping girls or threatening to
by barging-men pushing first through the doors of power

while good men act as if nothing mattered more
than to restore the faded elf to the christmas tree
to greet you every morning with toast and tea
to be the hand pressed in the hole the bullet tore

I refuse to let the good men go unsung
They are not many. They are one and one and one . . .


Cally Conan-Davies is a writer who expresses here her complex feelings of rage and powerful gratitude.

INCANTATION: LET THE MAGIC BEGIN

by Mare Leonard

art by Noely Ryan @ ArtStation

You can't catch me, I'm the Gingerbread Man. I can grab your pussy, stick out my tongue, spit, sputter like geysers from below.

Into what hell of fake news,  ruse of tax cuts,  mountains of lies, the lawyer in the room guise  stirs the cauldron  today? Don't lean on hopes of Flynt. He scratched a rock, lit a light of immunity for morality or him? Like a geyser, he may spark, sputter, reach to the sky and fizzle. The devil resides in the cauldron below. Deep under the caw caw of the crow, geysers spout up and we shout this is it, the one, howl, don't let babies burn  burn, burn, don't let lifelines fall through the cracks, don't give  billions to the rich. don't mock the middle, the poor, the immigrant. Drown out congressmen in LaLaLand who like Marie Antoinette shout, Let them eat cake. Geese honkhonk, Resist. How does the GOPP, the party of the pedophiles exist, how do they move and eat and sleep? Hooked on opiods, burgers, midnight tweets, a belief in trickle down economics, the lie that sweeps the donors cash for their ten thou dinner treats, another castle on a hill?  We observe, take photos when the earth splits, sweeps you all below. We sing, you can run you but you can't hide, you can shout  but Mueller and the FBI will  crack you GingerBreadMan and your vanilla wafer friends. You'll tremble and crumble, rollrollroll into the underland.  And in the heavens  the #MeToo will light the sky.  We'll sing, love, love, love, hug women, men, babies, The LGBTQ, DACA, Muslims all who  rise from the dead to hear from above no one can  pardon the King of Scam.

Mare Leonard lives in an old school house overlooking The Rondout Creek. Away from her own personal blackboard, she teaches through the Institute for Writing and Thinking and the MAT program at Bard College.  Although her most natural writing voice is humorous she has published in a range of voices and in all forms and subject matters. She was a finalist in last year's NY State Di Biase contest. Some of her latest publications appear in the Vietnam poetry publication from Perfume River, Rats Ass Review, Figroot, Sweet Tree, Eunoia and in the British Journal of Arts&Letters.

WHY WE STAY SILENT

by Deborah Coy

"The woman said Mr. Lauer asked her to unbutton her blouse, which she did. She said the anchor then stepped out from behind his desk, pulled down her pants, bent her over a chair and had intercourse with her. At some point, she said, she passed out with her pants pulled halfway down. She woke up on the floor of his office, and Mr. Lauer had his assistant take her to a nurse. The woman told The Times that Mr. Lauer never made an advance toward her again and never mentioned what occurred in his office. She said she did not report the episode to NBC at the time because she believed she should have done more to stop Mr. Lauer. She left the network about a year later." —“NBC Receives at Least 2 New Complaints About Matt Lauer," The New York Times, November 29, 2017

I never told the school
how the boy groped me
in the art room.
They would have blamed it on
my sexy new sweater.

I never told the teacher
how the boy behind me
rubbed his foot on my ass
day after day.
I just scooted forward.

Who tells about the
innuendos on the street,
in the hallways?
“They all do it” and
you go on, a little smaller.

Who could you tell
when the voice
coming from the receiver
speaks the unmentionable?
You just block your phone.

Why tell on the
Octopus boy you are with
at the drive in who thinks the price
of your admission
is your body?

They wouldn’t believe
if I told of the veteran
who stood outside
my locked bathroom door
pounding his desire.

I never told my father
how the man we called Uncle
propositioned me because
I didn’t want to cause their ancient
friendship to end.

I never told because
I was wearing a miniskirt.
I never told because
of the skin I showed
with my low-cut blouse.

He never told how I
moved in too close for a hug
His body was so nice
and he knew
he was irresistible.

I never told
because I knew
it was my fault
I felt shamed.
After all, “boys will be boys.”

Deborah Coy is an editor with award-winning Beatlick Press (New Mexico/Arizona Book Awards). She has had multiple poems published in various small presses.

LIFE NOIR

by David Feela






Old movies
permit a man
seducing a woman
to grab her,
even as the woman
fights back.
Her role
requires she be
handled by men,
aversion or
explicit refusal
written into
a script that ends
for the audience
like a fairytale.
The director
understands,
he too is a man
and he wants her
to resist, loves
seeing how
grandly she demurs,
every retake
just to prove
she wants
to get it
right.


David Feela writes a monthly column for The Four Corners Free Press and for The Durango Telegraph. A poetry chapbook, Thought Experiments, won the Southwest Poet Series. His first full length poetry book The Home Atlas appeared in 2009. His new book of essays How Delicate These Arches released through Raven's Eye Press, has been chosen as a finalist for the Colorado Book Award.

EVEN CHARLIE ROSE

by Felicia Sanzari Chernesky

Go ahead—watch and weep,
for it’s too late to shut our eyes.
No more falling back asleep!
Just go ahead—watch and weep—
every channel crawls with creeps.
Unmask the truth! Unveil their lies
then go ahead—watch and weep.
It’s far too late to shut our eyes.

Felicia Sanzari Chernesky is the longtime managing and poetry editor of the quarterly Academic Questions and the newish author of picture books. Her latest is The Boy Who Said Nonsense (Albert Whitman Company & 2016). She runs a poetry writing seminar for seniors, which has been one of the most invigorating and illuminating experiences of her life.

INGLORIOUS BASTARDS

by Kathleen A. Lawrence





Acting badly,
boorish comics
coax deranged egos.
False good-guys
going Hollywood,
icons indecently
jones and jerk,
kindling lascivious
meager manhoods.
Nihilistic ogres, odd
paunchy producers,
quibble ruthlessly.
Ransacking solicitors,
sleazy thieves
undressing virtue,
these villains wither,
when exposed,
yanking zippers
ad nauseam.

Kathleen A. Lawrence continues to write poetry in upstate New York. Recently she received word that two of her poems have been nominated for 2017 Best of the Net awards, and another was nominated for the 2017 Rhysling Award of the international Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association (SFPA). She has also  had poems published in Rattle (Poets Respond), Eye to the Telescope, haikuniverse, Silver Blade Magazine, The Wild Word magazine (Germany), Altered Reality Magazine, Undertow Tanka Review, and Proud to Be: Writing by American Warriors, among others.