I'M WITH HER

by Marsha Owens

Image source: Redbubble

I stood in the school lunch line, the boy behind
me snapped the bra buckled across my back,
an awkward restraint on my vanishing childhood.
My face flushed crimson, my shame hot without words
to fling into the high-pitched laughter of pimply boys.

I remember quiet talks about bleeding from wherever
so a girl could do what only a girl could do—give birth,
bloody and magnificent pushing forward a heart,
lungs, fingers, toes—in a man’s world, honey, Mom
said, a man’s world.

I heard a school principal explain how his interview
process involved breasts, how he told young women
to bend their elbows, place them against the wall
so he could determine—A, B, or C cup—all the better
to teach with, I suppose.

Years, centuries even before this 21st Century brought me
to her and her and her, the daughter, still plump with maternal
juices, smiling the mother-love of daughters and mothers, a
raucous cry trickles down my face, “Hot damn! I’m with HER!”


Marsha Owens says, “I am a child of the sixties, and my home state of Virginia still has not ratified the Equal Rights Amendment. “

CALL AND RESPONSE

by Michelle Marie

Say radical.
Say feminism.
Say Qur'an.
And confuse the fuck out of Americans
Who forget that
Christian values
Inspired both the slave driver
And the abolitionist.
A religion can be more
Than one thing
At once.

Michelle Marie was a blog correspondent for Stop Street Harassment and is currently a reader columnist for The News Tribune.

SINNED AGAINST

by Kit Zak

For fifteen seconds they streaked across the TV
three gals sporting signs for Ray
boobs pressed against t’s in baiting provocation
pom-pomming their support
for Ravens’ player Rice (only the latest)

maybe it happens in infancy
ingrained in DNA
the girl-child, Adam’s cast-off rib
second best/ split tail
cheerleading their hearts out

maybe the father preferred sons
or he submerges the mother’s weak ego--
witness the daughters, their voiceless smiling
how some touchstone for female being
repeats/repeats

ritualized violation
in one hundred and twenty countries
girls as young as five
held down by fellow females
their womanhood razored or knifed
and if they survive
proclaimed pure.                                                                                                        

uncounted nuns minioned to priests
unequal for centuries
tonguing their shame
as ‘the good father’ dispenses the wafers                                                                                                  
and we, who have been tattooed to serve
smile and offer tea.


Kit Zak retired from teaching and threw herself into some environmental projects in sea-threatened Delaware. She has published poems in The New Verse News, California Quarterly, A Time of Singing, The Blue Collar Review, and The Broadkill Review as well as several anthologies. 

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).

WHEN LIGHTNING STRIKES MEN

by Beate Sigriddaughter

When lightning strikes men, women beware!
Saul turns into Paul. Once playboy, now he declares
women off limits and men their head.
Luther turns from celibate monk to marriage
and proclaims that women have broader hips
so as to better sit on them at home while men
conduct importance elsewhere in the world.
Augustine, story has it, only saw lightning strike
something else. It affects him all the same.
Formerly playboy, too, he now pens spicy diatribes.
He knows whereof he speaks, condemning
women for having these beautiful bodies,
or even ugly ones, for that matter, inciting such
vicious and indomitable lust in men,
which bodies, even though their owners have no souls
and are stupid and useless, they nevertheless connived
to create purposely for the downfall of men,
just like Eve once frivolously fed an apple to Adam.
Because, you see, God created everything
except apparently women’s bodies, for which they are
entirely themselves to blame. God would have never
fashioned anything that vexing and demoralizing
to the peace of the stalwart masters of the universe.
Amen.


Beate Sigriddaughter is a US citizen currently living and writing in North Vancouver, Canada. Her work has received three Pushcart Prize nominations. She has also established the Glass Woman Prize to honor passionate women’s voices. Currently she is working on a novel called Tango.