DEFENDING WOMEN FROM GENDER IDEOLOGY EXTREMISM AND RESTORING BIOLOGICAL TRUTH TO THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT

by Cindy Ellen Hill

an extraction poem from...

Text

Purpose.  

deny the biological reality of sex purpose

access intimate sex

spaces for women, from women, to women  

eradicate the biological reality of sex

attack women

depriving them of their dignity

The erasure of sex in truth is critical

immutable biological reality of sex

biological facts. 

the true and biological category of “woman”

transforms laws and policies

defend women’s rights

protect freedom of conscience

recognize two sexes, male and female.  

These sexes are

grounded in fundamental

incontrovertible reality.  

promote this reality “Sex”

immutable biological classification “Sex”

not a synonym

there is a vast spectrum of genders

disconnected from one’s sex. 

from biological reality and sex

existing on an infinite continuum,

as a replacement for sex.

the term “sex”

Federal employees’ sex,

single-sex rape

shelters the freedom to express

the nature of sex

Cindy Ellen Hill has authored three chapbooks, Wild Earth (Antrim Press 2021), Elegy for the Trees (Kelsay Books 2022), and Mosaic (Wild Dog Press 2024). Her full-length collection Love in a Time of Climate Change is forthcoming in 2025 from Finishing Line Press. Her essays on poetry have appeared in American Poetry Review and Unlikely Stories. She twice won the Vermont Writer’s Prize.

SOCIOBIOLOGICAL

by Tom Bauer

E.O. Wilson, famed entomologist and pioneer in the field of sociobiology, dies at 92.

It’s safe to say. It's like the species does

what others do, but quickly, consciously,

aware of what it does while doing it,

like caterpillars on the dying edge;

the lava comes, the inner circle’s safe;

above it rains, they’re safe below, beneath

the layers of others, those who will go first,

who'll dive off leaves into the drowning ground.

The finest traits in all the kingdom are

amassed and ready in the mass, to move,

adapt, the speed of thought, instant meta

class of entity, biology, human,

bipedal feces-maker, building wide

a grand estate of armor-plated lies.

Tom Bauer grew up playing violin and listening to spoken word recordings. When he was ten, he rashly announced he was going to be a poet. He did a bunch of university and stuff. He's had some poems published. He lives in Montreal and plays board games.

LESSONS OF THE OSTRACODS

by Richard Meyer

The male ostracod Cypideis salebrosa, his genitals shaded in the photograph. (Maria João Fernandes Martins)

By studying dozens of fossilized ostracods, [researchers] have found that species where males . . .  have larger penises—disappear far more quickly. They say that it’s not size that matters, but what you do with it; what ostracods do with it is go extinct. —The Atlantic, 11 April 2018


Attention homo sapiens—
the men, that is, the average ones,
the less endowed below the belt—
that insufficiency you’ve felt
is but a myth—you’re now set free
by studies in biology.

Among the creatures in the sea,
the species known as ostracods
whose males possessed prodigious rods
became extinct while others thrived.

No longer lacking, flawed, deprived,
with evolution on your side,
embrace your normal tools with pride
and know in life, to their chagrin,
the biggest pricks don’t always win.

Richard Meyer’s poems have appeared in various publications, including Able Muse, The Raintown Review, Think, Measure, Light, TheNewVerse.News, Alabama Literary Review, and The Evansville Review. He was awarded the 2012 Robert Frost Farm Prize for his poem “Fieldstone” and was the recipient of the 2014 String Poet Prize for his poem “The Autumn Way.” A book of his collected poems, Orbital Paths, was a silver medalist winner in the 2016 IBPA Benjamin Franklin Awards.

INTERSTITIUM

by Harold Oberman

With all that’s known about human anatomy, you wouldn’t expect doctors to discover a new body part in this day and age. But now, researchers say they’ve done just that: They’ve found a network of fluid-filled spaces in tissue that hadn’t been seen before. These fluid-filled spaces were discovered in connective tissues all over the body, including below the skin’s surface; lining the digestive tract, lungs and urinary systems; and surrounding muscles, according to a new study detailing the findings, published today (March 27) in the journal Scientific Reports. Image source: Getty Images via Scientific American, March 27, 2018.

The hidden waterway beneath our skin
Flows freely.  For the moment
It's an organ unburdened by metaphor, unlike the heart.

Undiscovered rivers in the modern age are rare.
Deep in the Amazon perhaps, hidden from satellites
By tree cover and a murky flow
That mimics the surrounding underbrush,
Banked by birds so exotic they were indexed one time and forgotten,
There is a tributary no one has seen.

It hid in plain sight, the interstitium.
The chemicals used to study the skin
Destroyed it.  Dissected, it collapsed from the weight of its discovery.


Harold Oberman is a lawyer and poet living and writing in Charleston, S.C.

ZOOXANTHELLAE

by Eben Gering

“We must not pretend that the countless people who are routinely targeted by police are 'isolated.' They are the canaries in the coal mine whose deaths, civil and literal, warn us that no one can breathe in this atmosphere.” —Sonia Sotomayor dissenting from the majority opinion in Utah v. Strieff, June 20, 2016

There’s a soft green thing inside the stony corals
we call Fingers, Brains, Tongues, that can turn
sunlight into fuel;
this is how the corals grow—an umbilical connection
to our planet’s mothering star.

Something we’ve done to the sea
is making them leave,
and leaving
bones of living reefs
to gasp at wet lenses
that flood with a harshening light.

We know some of why
this is happening—
acidification,
a kind of infection,
climatic instability.

And we also know,
in a better world,
bleached corals can grow again.

If their symbionts return, they’ll sing
the many-colored songs
of the healthy, living
reef.


Eben Gering is an evolutionary biologist at Michigan State University.

EXCLUSION ZONE

by Joan Mazza

Evolutionary biologist Timothy Mousseau and his colleagues have published 90 studies that prove beyond all doubt the deleterious genetic and developmental effects on wildlife of exposure to radiation from both the Chernobyl and Fukushima nuclear disasters, writes Linda Pentz Gunter. But all that peer-reviewed science has done little to dampen the 'official' perception of Chernobyl's silent forests as a thriving nature reserve. —The Ecologist, April 25, 2016

Thirty years after Chernobyl’s accident
spilled radiation equal to twenty Hiroshimas,
wolves, roe deer, boar, bison, and moose thrive
between abandoned apartment buildings and once-
tended fields and gardens. Animals too contaminated
to eat. Appearing to be normal, they meander
within what is left of Pripyat. Tourists travel
to photograph the haunting beauty of decaying
buildings, trees flowering in spring, ignore long-term
threats of gamma particles that enter their bodies—
silent with their sinister destruction. This zone
is an unintentional wildlife sanctuary,

while Fukushima fallout spreads eastward
across the Pacific Ocean toward the west coast
of the Americas. Southern California seaweed
holds five times the normal radiation. What this
means for other foods, for long-term human
health, we don’t yet know. The ocean maps show
the field widening, contaminating fish, plankton,
and mammals, dumping tsunami debris on islands
along the way. Another natural experiment.
Perhaps another surprise nature reserve. We wait
to see what it brings, which of the fittest survives.
No one will be excluded from this test.

Joan Mazza has worked as a medical microbiologist, psychotherapist, seminar leader, and has been a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee. Author of six self-help psychology books, including Dreaming Your Real Self (Penguin/Putnam), her poetry has appeared in Rattle, Kestrel, The MacGuffin, Mezzo Cammin, Buddhist Poetry Review, and The Nation. She ran away from the hurricanes of South Florida to be surprised by the earthquakes and tornadoes of rural central Virginia, where she writes poetry and does fabric and paper art.