3 EXCUSES FOR NOT MARCHING AND THEN A POEM

by Melissa Fite Johnson

A woman wears a Statue of Liberty crown and holds a torch at the Women’s March in New York on Saturday. Credit Sara Hylton/The New York Times via Alaska Dispatch News, January 22, 2017



1. Dry throat I must coat with water or I’ll cough. 
2. Dog-sitting for a friend so she can march. 
3. The angry parent who checked Facebook 
to confirm I’m a liberal teacher.  

He might find this poem.
It makes me squirm, the thought he could take 
my thoughts from my head. My old professor 
always says, It’s easier not to write. 
Today, it was easier not to lurch 
open the garage, turn the key, thrust myself 
into history, into the brave crowd 
filling their lungs with songs instead of doubt. 
My body won’t speck a grainy photograph. 

August 28, 1963, a young girl rested 
her arm on a rail, her head on her arm. The video 
unspools her at “sweltering with the heat of 
oppression.” Every phrase was 
a lighted match. Each flame passed through her. 

January 21, 2017, what words, what fire
I could have carried home like a torch.


Melissa Fite Johnson’s first collection, While the Kettle’s On (Little Balkans Press, 2015), won the Nelson Poetry Book Award and is a Kansas Notable Book.  Her poems have appeared in Valparaiso Poetry Review, Rust + Moth, Broadsided Press, velvet-tail, and elsewhere.  Melissa teaches English and lives with her husband in Kansas.

JANUARY 13TH, 2017

by Marc Swan

https://www.womensmarch.com

In a short hop against convention, my wife
and I were married on a Friday the 13th. Today
a road trip to honor one. We drive to Belfast, two
hours north, to the Farmer’s Market. My wife’s
a large fan of fresh produce even in wintertime. We
meet a local farmer with twenty-three water buffalo.
I’m staggered by the number, more shocked by how
they survive. This isn’t India or Southeast Asia. She
assures me they have a warm barn, plenty to eat.
My wife buys milk for yogurt. The farmer tells us,
you’ll be amazed. I’m starting to feel the healthy
pull of the day. We travel route one to Rockland
for lunch, the warmth of an Irish cafe. Good food,
friendly staff generous with their time, tables fill
as people trundle in from the cold wind blowing
outside. From here we drive south to Wiscasset
to see a favorite shop owner who in short order
expresses her growing feelings about the election.
Every Friday thru the holidays she’s been donating
twenty per cent of her sales to five nonprofits that
will likely be battered under the new regime.
Her heart sings Cohen’s “Hallelujah" as we talk
of support for those things that separate thinking
folks from those who think chaos should reign.
Across the street in another store, a saleslady we’ve
never met senses our liberal lean. Running her hands
thru her thick blond-tinted hair, she talks of the march
in Washington and how important it is to be there—
she will “next Saturday.” Eyes water as she goes
on about rip and tear on what was once understood
as democracy too quickly becoming something
with another name from lessons never learned:
fascist, authoritarian, despotic and in these
difficult times we live, simply wrong.

Marc Swan’s poems have recently been published or forthcoming in Scrivener Creative Review, Crannóg, Mudfish, Gargoyle, Nuclear Impact Anthology, Coal City Review, among others. He lives with his wife Dd in Portland Maine. 

HAPPINESS, THE A-BOMB, AND WHY I DON'T MARCH ANYMORE

by Lynnie Gobeille 

AMERICA IS TAKING A STAND FOR EQUAL RIGHTS. JANUARY 21 AT 1:00 PM EASTERN TIME, RISE FOR ONE MINUTE OF SILENCE FOR WOMEN'S EQUALITY. Saturday, January 21, there are women’s marches and rallies planned in all 50 states. At 1:00 PM in Our Nation's Capital and at the exact same moment in every time zone across the United States, stand up for equality in one minute of silent solidarity. From Hawaii to Maine, Alaska to Florida, and every great state in between, for one shared silent minute, we rise for our mothers, our sisters, our daughters, and ourselves. 1@1 is a small, symbolic act in support of the American ideal of one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. It is one powerful minute to connect, reflect and recommit to making that American ideal a reality. Whether able to attend a rally or not, all Americans can join this unifying action on behalf of women, girls and the future of our nation.

What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness, but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice towards those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black." —Robert Kennedy, April 4, 1968

Let’s just say
For the sake of argument
That this is the last poem
I’ll ever write—
(having just shoveled an entire driveway
. . . good lord at my age, that’s quite the feat . . .
feet- no pun intended)
And there's a good chance I might die tonight . . .
Would I want this poem to contain
A seagull?  A fence?  An open gate?
Perhaps my sister’s new garage door happiness?
The draining of the swamp?
Toss in the news of the Ft. Lauderdale Airport shooting
A line or two just to prove I was still aware—
Of the total lack of kindness every where.

I would, of course, want to include a stanza
To clarify Why I no longer march . . .
Not against or for—
make love not war.
Yet I find it difficult to phrase
To sum up all those years and causes
Crossing those picket lines—
yes . . . I have the scars to prove it—
carrying signs.

Every where a sign—
Long haired hippie freaks need not apply,
Power to the People
Four dead in Ohio,
and it's 1, 2 , 3
What are you marching for, don’t ask me.
I don’t give a damn—my last stop was in Vietnam
We shall overcome—
We Shall Overcome.

But let’s get back to the A-bomb in this title.
Oppenheimer was merely a scientist—
or perhaps he was a poet just like me—
Creating and solving the huge man-kind mystery.
Ay, there’s the rub in life.


Lynnie Gobeille is passionate about  poetry.

SOME WORDS FOR MEANWHILE

by Lucia Galloway

Poster by Jennifer Maravillas for the Women's March on Washington

There is only this way,
this one way,
to breathe   while
rain falls­—
finally falls & falls­—
in Southern California.
Comes in repeated fits,
storms over parched lands
& lawns.  Pools at our doorsteps
from overflowing gutters, sheets
off the pavements of parking lots,
carves new rivulets
in our gardens, our
paths and trails.

One way    while
crews erect viewing stands
in DC­-mile after mile
of bleachers, media towers­-
along the storied route.
While in airports, passengers
clutch boarding passes, eye
podium monitors.
While on basement floors
& kitchen tables, women paint
slogans: Resistance is Joy.
Pack boots, mufflers
& down jackets.
D.C., Chicago, Tucson, Denver, L.A.
. . . (will the buses make it?)     while
the women hope that nothing happens,
knowing that nothing
can mean anything now.

Lucia Galloway’s chapbook The Garlic Peelers won the Quill’s Edge Press 2014 inaugural chapbook competition.  She is also author of Venus and Other Losses (2010) and a chapbook, Playing Outside (2005), and has published work in Tar River Poetry, Comstock Review, Midwest Quarterly, and Wide Awake: Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond, among other publications.  Her poems have received awards from the Bread Loaf School of English, Artists Embassy International, Rhyme Zone, and the MacGuffin National Poet Hunt.  She lives in Southern California, where she curates a reading series in her home town of Claremont.  

A NATIONAL DAY OF MOURNING

by Mary Saracino

Poster by JessicaSabogal for We the People which will flood Washington, DC with NEW symbols of hope on January 20. You can download the set of posters for free at http://bit.ly/wtpdownloads.

I will wear black on January 20
a national day of mourning
while the collective soul of America
lets loose a dirge as an illegitimate president
takes the oath of office
his place secured in history
by fake news, voter suppression
the deception of a foreign dictator
and his own brand of white supremacy
spewed from his bully pulpit of
racism, misogyny, xenophobia, homophobia
and every other kind of –ism the world has ever witnessed

On the next day the women of the world will don
pink pussy hats, take to the streets in cities far and wide
to march in protest, defying the fake king, the tyrant
in the Oval Office
reclaiming their vulva power,  the power to
procreate truth, to name evil, to smash
the glass ceiling of lies that tries to silence us

Mary Saracino is a novelist, poet, and memoir writer who lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Her most recent novel is Heretics: A Love Story (Pearlsong Press 2014). Her novel, The Singing of Swans (Pearlsong Press 2006) was a 2007 Lambda Literary Awards Finalist. Mary’s short story, "Vicky's Secret," earned the 2007 Glass Woman Prize.