TAR

by Jess

The world is burning, 

So I took a lighter and match, 

And set fire to my craft, 

So my nails could saw and sear my keyboard, 

So black plastic can burn and rise, 

Sting wide nostrils, smoke Spanish shaped eyes, 

With memories of my community in zip ties, 

Hoping its loud clack might drown and drown, 

The images of  that little girls tears, 

As her mom was forcefully pushed down, 

By a non-native in a black vest,

Twisting our poetry into tar, 

To gag our syllables and curls, 

As white women recorded and watched, for their performative internet fodder, 

A small brown girl escorted home, without her father. 

So I go deep in the iambics of colonizer language, 

Because they cut, lynched and burned our tongues, 

In the Rio Grande of Texas,

And from Boston, 

I can hear the screams of Chicago and Canal Street. 

They can come and hang me from the Texas Oak Trees, 

In high June, 

Before they take the words  in me,

They can tighten the rope, 

Make it a hundred degree day, 

Scorched earth and crackling grass, 

The smell of magnolias and cookouts, 

They will see the blue come over me, 

Before they take the Mexican me. 

Jess is a Mexican American / Arab Proxmate human rights activist and writer from South Texas. She has been nominated for a PEN Robert J. Dau Prize and Pushcart Prize for her story "Feathers." Her poetry and op-eds have been published by Dissident Voice, The International Human Rights Art Movement, Poets x Hunger, and Missing Perspectives. She has forthcoming work with Writers Resist and Radical Catalyst Literary Journal. She holds a masters from Brandeis in Conflict Resolution. 

RAISING THE MINIMUM WAGE

by Skaidrite Stelzer

Image source: Windsor Star

The old man smokes on the bus bench

at the Cherry Street Mission in Toledo, Ohio,

hunched over in permanent posture

while the radio blares out against him--

hate speech still allowed against anyone

who can’t make a living. 

The minimum wage shrunken over the years.

“See a coin and pick it up.” 

And the smacking of lips by observers

because he must drink.

Begging is outlawed now in most places,

though I see it discreetly hidden behind signs.

“Will work for food.”

I give her a dollar.

In the East Village, years ago,

a homeless man slept each night in the back

of our pick-up truck.

Others ran to clean our windshields

with dirty rags.

Vying for coins, jostling against each other:

the ballet of poverty.

“All that day you’ll have good luck.”

The majority rules,

making the rich even richer,

giving them more and more

as we hide the poor.

There are still neglected alleys.

Some freeze each winter but we don’t

see their names in the newspapers.

“See a coin and let it lay.”

A minimal wage for a minimal day

cannot buy a home or a room.

I see him scrounging the gutters for cigarette butts,

and when I look at him he gestures and yells.

“Out of his mind,” I have told myself.

Yet he earns his morning coffee.

He cleans the sidewalk of the Sufficient Grounds

coffee shop on Central Street.

No job, no money, but here’s his warm reward.

“What are you looking at?”

or a greeting; it varies.

Then he freezes one winter

like the rest.

Because he was somebody’s son,

there is a small obituary in The Blade.

“You’ll have bad luck all that day.”

The radio blares its message.

The rich need more money.

They must have more money.

One day they are bound to share.

“See a coin and pick it up.”

The frozen sidewalk has no eyes.

Skaidrite Stelzer is a poet and teacher living in Toledo Ohio.  A post-WWII refugee, she grew up in Michigan as a displaced person. Her poems have appeared in many journals, including the Georgetown Review, Eclipse, The Fourth River and The Baltimore Review. She teaches a variety of writing and literature courses at The University of Toledo.