MANDATE

by Laura Rodley

My eyes see the road but my hands

steer the wheel, car ahead,

snow banks to my right,

more snow falling. It feels 

like a hundred years

now and still I have not

heard from you my daughter.

The daughter that was just a wish,

a dream, an incessant urge,

a tug to the infinite

and so I reached my hands

up and pulled you down

from clouds full of precipitation,

the month was November that

you were born, the isle of snow,

but conceived in February

on Valentine’s Day, my hands

full of the eyes of your father,

the sky filled with snowflakes.

Laura Rodley, Pushcart Prize winner, is a quintuple Pushcart Prize nominee and quintuple Best of Net nominee. Latest books: Turn Left at Normal by Big Table Publishing, Counter Point by Prolific Press, and just off the press, As You Write It Lucky Lucky 7, a collection of 11 writers' work.

ILLINOIS MAN PROTESTS REST STOP CLOSURE, CLAIMS HE WAS CONCEIVED IN BUILDING

by Elizabeth Johnston

DES PLAINES, Ill. (CBS) – A 21-year-old Crystal Lake man staged a one-man protest Friday morning over the permanent closing this weekend of the Des Plaines Oasis along the Jane Addams Memorial Tollway. The reason will do doubt come as a surprise. WBBM Newsradio’s Mike Krauser reports Kevin Walters chained himself to the door of the oasis, and said to understand why, you have to go back more than two decades.

A man in handcuffs imagines himself Adam
guarding the Tree.

Would not we all, if once we could,
chain ourselves to certainty:

Here life began,
against all odds
has purpose.


Elizabeth Johnston is a founding member of the award-winning writer's group, Straw Mat.  You can read her prose and poetry in various anthologies and literary journals, including Yellow Medicine Review, Mom Egg Review, Organs of Vision and Sense, and Trivia: Voices of Feminism, among others. She teaches writing and gender studies in Rochester, NY, where she lives with her husband, two daughters, and a menagerie of animals.