SPINNING

by Shawn Aveningo-Sanders

The latest weather dome has uncovered us from its blanket of unrelenting heat. At last, I can walk the trails near my house and not need the inhaler in my pocket. I let the laundry pile up in order to save the grid for more important things—lamplight, fans, the refrigerator’s hum. I’m wearing a T-shirt I haven’t worn in almost ten years with its rainbowed Love is Love on soft heather gray and Legalize Gay on the back. I still remember crying that day the courts ruled in favor of my daughters’ future weddings. I imagine the celebration in the hearts of Black Americans when the Civil Rights Act was signed, a year before I was born. I was too young to understand the ruling in ’73 but have been grateful for rights afforded to our sisters, our mothers, our friends. Now the Ferris Wheel is spinning in reverse. I watch the unraveling of progress in the name of pseudo-freedom, mock patriotism and the so-called good ole days. And here we stand, hand in hand, left wondering which car will be stuck at the top, once this ride comes to an end.

carnival tickets 

scattered like wildflower seeds

we wait for the rain

Shawn Aveningo-Sanders’ poems have appeared worldwide in literary journals including Calyx, ONE ART, Eunoia Review, Blue Heron Review, Tule Review, Amsterdam Quarterly, About Place Journal, and Snapdragon, to name a few. She is the author of What She Was Wearing, a chapbook that reveals her #metoo secret after forty years. She’s co-founder of The Poetry Box press and managing editor of The Poeming Pigeon. Shawn is a proud mother of three amazing humans and Nana to one darling baby girl. She shares the creative life with her husband in Oregon.

ROE V. WADE—THE PREQUEL, 1972

by Marianne Gambaro

I guess I can’t blame them

for feeling the way they do.

 

They weren’t there.

They didn’t see your ashen face

against the blood-soaked

laundry service sheets

on your dorm bed.

 

I wish I could remember your name—

Karen, I think,

or maybe Caryn—

your whitebread family

was pretentiously middle class

so would have spelled it differently,

not at all like that boy

who knocked you up.

Did he disappear fast when you told him!

 

You were a quiet girl, younger

than the rest of us freshmen,

smarter too,

with all your advanced placement classes.

 

I think it was your roommate who took you

to that bogus doctor in Pennsylvania,

who stayed with you

and finally called the RA

when she couldn’t stop the bleeding.

 

You never did come back to the dorm.

Did you come back to school?

Did you even live?

No one talked about you after you left,

at least not above a whisper.

 

I guess I can’t blame them

for feeling the way they do now.

But maybe you can.

 

Marianne Gambaro’s poems and essays have been published in print and online journals including Mudfish, CALYX, Oberon Poetry Magazine, Pirene's Fountain, Avocet Journal, Snowy Egret, and The Naugatuck River Review. She is the author of Do NOT Stop for Hitchhikers (Finishing Line Press). She lives in verdant Western Massachusetts, with her talented photographer-husband and two feline muses.

PRAYING FOR YOU, GOV

by Darrell Petska

Republican Gov. Pete Ricketts of Nebraska said Sunday that he will call a special session of his state's legislature to pass a total ban on abortion if the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade this term. "Nebraska is a pro-life state. I believe life begins at conception, and those are babies too," Ricketts told CNN's Dana Bash on "State of the Union" when asked if he thought the state should require a young girl who was raped to carry the pregnancy to term. —CNN, May 15, 2022

Of course rape is evil,

but evil left to proliferate in a woman

tends to strike again and again in all its

suffocating helplessness, trauma, chronic

anxiety and nightmarish violation,

with all its attendant heartache.

Political one-upmanship and pietisms

that insist on allowing rape's evil to live on

by citing "directives" of god or bandying

emotionally fraught trigger words—

manipulating evil to sell one's agenda—

are beneath a purported man of god

and the yea-saying cadres of men sharing

narrow perceptions of a woman's uterus,

including its role in shaping cognitive

and emotional well-being and the drive

for self-determination—the latter a right

not reserved for men alone.

The shelf-life of your brand of religiosity

is short. We who espouse a more merciful,

compassionate religion pray that your efforts

to be both judge and executioner will fall

to the light, lest "Nebraska Nice" succumbs

to the politics clouding your heart and soul.

Darrell Petska lives and writes in Wisconsin, but part of his heart remains in his birth state of Nebraska.

SOME TOXIC ELEMENTS OF THE PATRIARCHY

by Emily Rock

Jack Ohman: Law & Order, Senate GOP

…were on display in the Senate as Ketanji Brown Jackson

faced down the Judiciary Committee

on the way to (please, let it be so) the Supreme Court.

 

Ghostly white Lindsey Graham, with his trademark drawl,

claimed “It’s about ‘we’re all racist’ if we ask hard questions.  

That’s not gonna fly with us.”

 

She was gracious: “I am happy to do whatever…”

she said as Chuck Grassley mumbled gruffly, interrupting her.

“No, that’s alright,” she said.  “I’m sorry.”

The Senator from Missouri said in his tweets

that Judge Jackson’s record on child pornography offenders

went “beyond soft on crime,” her record “endangers our children.”

 

She was calm: “As a judge and a mother, nothing

could be further from the truth.”

And she explained, though Josh Hawley deserved nothing

 

from her, that she told every criminal defendant

about the many victims' statements she received,

ensuring the child's perspective was heard in her court.

 

“When I look in the eyes of a defendant who is weeping,” she said,

 “I tell them about a victim who developed agoraphobia,

who thinks everyone she meets will have seen her pictures on the internet.”

 

I imagined an unflinching Jackson looking an offender in the eyes,

not softened by his tears—the sad sad tears of a man who has been caught,

which reminded me of her future colleague, Brett Kavanaugh:

 

how he cried during his own confirmation hearing,

how his emotional outbursts would be blamed on PMS

if he were a woman instead of a self-righteous white man.

 

Ketanji Brown Jackson said “I hope that you will see

how much I love our country, and our Constitution,”

and I recalled Kavanaugh repeating “I like beer.”

 

I thought of his victims, Christine Blasey Ford

and the others whose voices were not heard,

who watched their assailant weep

 

and go red in the face, defend his honor,

defend his entitlement to a seat

on the highest court—and prevail.

 

If Ketanji Brown Jackson is confirmed,

she will join two men who have been credibly accused

of crimes against women,

 

she will join a supermajority of aggressors

gleefully eviscerating Roe v. Wade,

stripping voting protections,

 

all while claiming the mantle

of Originalism, their philosophy

stuck in the 1700s with the slave-owning founders.

 

And yet, Republicans have tarred her 

with the absurd accusation

that she is somehow a threat to “our children.”

 

Whose children, I would ask Josh Hawley.

Whose children are threatened by a black woman 

with a gavel and a robe?

Emily Rock is an attorney and mother of two who lives in New Haven, Connecticut.