KANSAS

by Donna Katzin

In the wake of Roe v. Wade’s demise

we see it coming—a blood-red wave  

that threatens to drown us

and our rights.

 

As pundits puzzle

and suited strategists opine,            

we step out from porches, campuses, back alleys,

leave our coat hangers in our closets,

 

rags and basins in our kitchens,

knock on doors of neighbors

who have yet to come out

of the house.                 

 

A horse parade prances by

with signs, “vote neigh,”

posters of a uterus

in a cowboy hat.

 

Texts like urgent birds,

words whispered, then spoken,

fly by in flocks unfettered

as our voices and our votes.

 

Our minds, our bodies                                                  

are our own—

will not be captured

any more than the wind.       

  

 

Author’s Note: On August 2, Kansas women and their supporters mobilized voters across the state to beat back a proposed amendment that would have allowed the state legislators to restrict or ban the abortion rights affirmed in the state’s constitution.  With an historic primary turn-out of half the state’s registered voters, the 59 to 41 percent victory at the polls built on decades of activism to protect women’s right to make their own decisions about their own bodies and health.  In the process, it set an important precedent for the nation following the US Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade.

Donna Katzin is the former and founding executive director of Shared Interest, a fund that mobilizes the human and financial resources of low-income communities of color in South and Southern Africa.  A board member of Community Change in the U.S., and co-coordinator of Tipitapa Partners working in Nicaragua, she has written extensively about South Africa, community development and impact investing.  Published in journals and sites including The New Verse News and The Mom Egg, she is the author of With the Hands, a book of poems and photographs about post-apartheid South Africa’s process of giving birth to itself.

DUNGEONS FROM DRAGONS

by Dennis Etzel Jr.

Asmund wakes me up for another game
as the sun tries rising in another December
morning I try to rise he says he likes to wake up
in a little dark time not too early
looks out the window over our back
yard over our Kansas our country
waking up I’ve never woken up in such a dark time
these gradual small wake-ups to dungeon builders

as our resistance is set to dismantle walls Asmund asks
if this little dark time is okay for me to wake up in
I say yes let’s go downstairs with your brothers to sit
navigate the dungeon together keeping the dragons
from getting further ahead as we search for a secret door
for freedom I show my sons how to throw the dice

Dennis Etzel Jr. lives with Carrie and the boys in Topeka, Kansas where he teaches English at Washburn University. He has an MFA from The University of Kansas, and an MA and Graduate Certificate in Women and Gender Studies from Kansas State University. He has two chapbooks, The Sum of Two Mothers (ELJ Publications 2013) and My Graphic Novel (Kattywompus Press 2015), a poetic memoir My Secret Wars of 1984 (BlazeVOX 2015), and Fast-Food Sonnets (Coal City Review Press 2016). His work has appeared in Denver Quarterly, Indiana Review, BlazeVOX, Fact-Simile, 1913: a journal of poetic forms, 3:AM, Tarpaulin Sky, DIAGRAM, and others. He is a TALK Scholar for the Kansas Humanities Council and leads poetry workshops in various Kansas spaces.

THE WATER PARK IN AUGUST

by Melissa Fite Johnson






I. Before

After Kansas City soccer, Children’s Mercy
Park, we drive south for home, two hours away.
The world’s tallest water slide looms at Schlitterbahn,
lit green at night, the spiral walk-up staircase
Godzilla’s head and body, the slide its tongue
unfurling.  Who would ride that monstrosity,
my husband and I joke, and it is a joke, menacing
as that structure is, because we’re safe in our car,
or feel we are at least, our breakable bodies and soft flesh
dashing down the highway in our aluminum bubble.

II. After

I imagine the boy they found in the pool
also felt safe, at least initially, strapped in his raft.
Higher than Niagara; faster than a cheetah;
steeper than any ski slope!  The website called the slide
jaw-dropping.  The website called the slide
gut-wrenching.  I shouldn’t read the stories.  They don’t
bring him back.  They all show the same picture:
brown eyes freckled nose dark hair baseball cap.
Baseball bat on his shoulder.  Ears like mine, elfish
tips that stick out, tinged red from the sun warming his back.

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.

LOBSTERS

by Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco

Three people have died in a series of shootings at three sites near Hesston, Kansas, including a lawn care products factory, authorities said Thursday night. Photo: Fernando Salazar, AP via USA Today, Feb. 25, 2016

When the dogs attack
your dog,

in the new park, you spend the whole time

wondering
if you are wrong, if somehow you

misunderstood.
The light is beautiful
that night:

a hollowed shell.
No one thinks of how the thing

that lives inside
gets boiled alive.

Buried.
Frozen. There
are manuals, online.

You start
shaking

when you see how the dogs’ mouths
are full of blood, you

started screaming
at some point, oh,
no, my god, although you don’t
believe in gods.

Thursday night, another man
shot everyone

like it was in
another language where this thing
just sometimes happens.

People tried
to explain:

the soft
warm evening, what he ate, the curling

screams
like lobsters boiling,

bumping dully
in the pot.


Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco lives in California's Central Valley, where she works as a librarian. Her chapbook Various Lies is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press.

WATCH VS. WARNING

by Marjorie Maddox

                                                                                        “Female-named hurricanes kill more

                                                                                          than male hurricanes because people

                                                                                          don’t respect them, study finds.”

                                                                                                            —Jason Samenow, 
                                                                                                   Washington Post,  June 2, 2014

Surely the whirling of this world

into some wind-gone-wild transport to Oz-

    opposite names the same tree-thrashing terror

or should, a double-edged Saffir-Simpson scale

of nurture/nature of respect in respect to

whose wrath shakes our quaking spirit

more, which also is just breath gone haywire,

this life built in the lungs and expired

into air as turbulent as any cascading

into climate-crashing crescendo

off the coast of somewhere.

Dorothy/Don, this isn’t

Kansas anymore.

      Each day

               the breeze

                 and we

                       pick up

                       more

                         vio-

                        lent-

                  ly

                brok-

          en.

Director of Creative Writing and professor of English at Lock Haven University, Marjorie Maddox’s book,  Local News from Someplace Else (Wipf & Stock 2013), focuses on living in an unsafe world. In addition, she has a new ebook, Perpendicular As I ( Kindle version, Nook version, Kobo version).

IT MIGHT RAIN

by Jim Gustafson

Reat Underwood, 14; his grandfather; and another innocent bystander were shot and killed when an anti-Semitic gunman opened fire in the parking lot of a Jewish Community Center in Kansas City on the eve of Passover. --Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America

"My wife has always been concerned about some loonies out there 

doing this type of stuff. You hear these things and it's really surreal. . . . 

We'll be back. You can't leave in fear."
--Jeff Nessel who had just dropped his 10-year-old son off 

at the Jewish Community Center in Kansas City

Even on the clearest day
when the sky is dressed-up
in its best self
It might rain

Even after the storm
when the water gutters
down to mix the earth in mud
It might rain

Even in the night
when the airliners strobe
unclouded in the sky
it might rain

Even beyond the door
when breath comes
and goes home with ease
it might rain


Jim Gustafson’s most recent book, Driving Home, was published by Aldrich Press in 2013 and is a 2013 Pushcart Prize Nominee. He is an MFA candidate at the University of Tampa, teaches at Edison State  College and  lives in Fort Myers, Florida, where he reads, writes, and pulls weeds.