FREE SPEECH

by Alixa Brobbey

Image Credits: Jim Watson/AFP/ (collage by TechCrunch) / Getty Images

You are free to stand on the sidewalk

with your thumbs up. You are free to like

this Tweet. You are free to boo silently.

You are free to clap loudly. You are free

to give me a dollar to vote in this poll.

You are free not to vote. You are free

to choose between silence and tinnitus.

You are free to leave. Here is the back 

door. You are free to leave without a 

goodbye. You are free to swallow

thumb tacks. You are free to live inside

this snake’s nest. You are free to

decide: hunger pains or cyanide.

You are free to give me another dollar

to vote in a new poll. You are free to know

nothing—I change this game at my whim.

You are free to play this game by my rules.

You are free to leave. You are free to

shut up and like this tweet. You are free

to comment well wishes. You are free

to correct my science—once. You are

free to be fired. You are free to leave.

Go stand outside. Sip some blue air.

Ponder the wide and winding road

that led us, somehow, here.

Alixa Brobbey spent portions of her childhood in The Netherlands and Ghana. She has a B.A. in English from Brigham Young University, where she won the Ethel Lowry Handley Poetry Prize in 2020. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in The Blue Marble Review, Segullah, Inscape, The Albion Review, The Susquehanna Review, The Palouse Review, The Exponent II, Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, and others. She is currently a law student at Brigham Young University.

REFUGEES

by Marietta Calvanico

I always called them yard cats,
Their numbers increased
after the fire at Randy’s—
Refugees,
The self-imagined puma
who lives in my house
never goes outside
but outside belongs to her,
and she wants them off
Her Territory,
tail switching back and forth
with great agitation until
she turns her back to erase
their existence.

The calico one, the black one,
the tabbies, orange and gray,
the one with half a tail,
Refugees,
I watch them move through
my garden,
sometimes pausing,
looking up, maybe to see me
at my window
and my knee-jerk reaction is
to give them the food
my own won’t eat
But I’ve been sagely warned—
Don’t do it.

Don’t feed them,
If you feed them,
they will never leave.


Marietta Calvanico lives in Staten Island, NY.  After spending a bit more than two decades in advertising/marketing, she now works with her architect husband and has been able to devote more time to writing and music.  Her poetry has appeared in The Bare Root Review, the damselfly press, Poem2day, Word Salad Poetry Magazine, River Poets, The Driftwood Review, and OccuPoetry; her short fiction in Joyful; and her non-fiction in Still Crazy and Avalon Literary Review.