WHILE ON FACEBOOK

by Andrea Murphy

I’ve become obsessed
scrolling and clicking
to read the obscene
blood splattered justifications
of racism in blue,
in blue with
bullets and badges.

One says: “Black Lives
Matter. Blah, blah, blah.”
Another says, “Kill the
blue rat bastards killing
us.”
SCROLL
CLICK
BREATHE

And I am black scrolling
And I am blue scrolling
And I am filled with
the numbers
of the mentally ill. Killed.
Of little black boys
with toy guns. Killed.
Scrolling and clicking
in terror, I beg my
husband to be a
loyal puppy,
docile dog when in a car
with expired tags
or broken tail light
or when caught making an
illegal turn. We have
a five year old daughter.
He’s sworn to wear
his license as dog tags.
SCROLL
CLICK
BREATHE

They dog-tag toes
of black men at
the morgue five times
more often than whites
killed by blue men.
SCROLL
CLICK
BREATHE
“Don’t shoot;
hands up.”
SCROLL
CLICK
BREATHE
And gasp
And grieve
at death and hate because
I am obsessed with the
loss of our humanity.



Andrea Murphy is a fifteen year educator, who is currently on hiatus. She has taught English at both high school and community college. During this hiatus, she has decided to focus on her passion for creative writing and is an emerging poet in the St. Mary’s of California MFA program. Recently, she published a poem on Moonglasses.com. If asked what she plans to do with her degree, she would tell you that she intends to enjoy it.  She loves the lyrical expression of language and has made it her primary intention of study as she writes about family, legacy, illness, and blackness from a “womanist” perspective.  

IF GOD GOT US TO IT, HE'LL GET US THROUGH IT, SAID THE MUFFIN PAN TO THE BACON PRESS

 by Laura Lee Washburn

Image source: John Darkow/Columbia [MO] Daily Tribune

You like your muffin pan with butter.
You eat it whole so the cups don’t stick
in your throat.  The butter helps.
You like your waiters black in white face.

You like stock still dark black men with trays for a party.
You drink iced tea with mint.  You smile
and belch a champagne-coated muffin tin burp.
You’re like a cookbook with hand drawings

of the Skyline drive, Smithfield ham on buttered
biscuits.  The muffin tin constipates you
a little bit.  China will manage spiral-cut hams
with your face on their packages.  China
makes your muffin tins bigger every year.

You eat muffin tins for lunch.  You eat
muffin tins, buttered, for breakfast.
You keep the cast iron bacon press greased
with bacon fat.  Nothing sticks in your craw.

The cast iron bacon press tastes like Tennessee
in 1963.  Your little monkey cooks it best.
Everything’s so hard to pass these days,
goes down easy, but sticks and stinks, a black
hard stool in your soft pink bowels.


Laura Lee Washburn is the Director of Creative Writing at Pittsburg State University in Kansas, and the author of This Good Warm Place: 10th Anniversary Expanded Edition (March Street) and Watching the Contortionists (Palanquin Chapbook Prize).  Her poetry has appeared in such journals as Cavalier Literary Couture, Carolina Quarterly, Ninth Letter, The Sun, Red Rock Review, and Valparaiso Review.  Born in Virginia Beach, Virginia, she has also lived and worked in Arizona and in Missouri.  She is married to the writer Roland Sodowsky.