THE BOOK OF QUIET GIRLS WHO BURN

by Linda K. Sienkiewicz

To the pediatrician who insisted on taking a rectal temperature with me across his knees,

To the pediatrician who tweaked my nipples during a physical,

To the neighbor’s grandfather who worked his fingers into my shorts,

To the stranger in Woolworth’s who grabbed my hand to rub against his crotch and ran,

To the boy who called me into the pool for one last swim and tried to drown me,

To the mechanical drawing teacher who rubbed his elbow against my breasts while checking my work,

To the employer who told his female, high-school-aged staff that whoever got the most sales would win an overnight date with him,

To the guy who raced his car through town while I screamed for life from the passenger seat after I said I was breaking up with him,

To the recruiter who told me to wear a short skirt to the job interview,

To the hiring manager who instructed waitress applicants to go heavy on makeup,

To the neurologist who sat on the arm of my chair, pinning me there in nothing but a hospital gown, while discussing my options,

To the employer who gave me a gold necklace but told me never to wear it at work,

To the guy who date raped me in a warehouse loft,

To the guy who parked in the woods and shoved my head into his crotch,

To the guy who said he should rape me after I broke up with him,

I remember every one of you.

Quiet. Quiet piggy.

Linda K. Sienkiewicz is the author of the multi-finalist award-winning novel Love and Other Incurable Ailments, forthcoming novel In the Context of Love, five poetry chapbooks and a children’s picture book. Among her awards are a poetry chapbook and a Pushcart Prize Nomination in poetry. She holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing, and serves as Honorary Director of Detroit Working Writers.

THE STUMBLING BLOCK

by Tamara Kreutz

Advocates for abuse victims at a rally outside the Southern Baptist Convention in Dallas in 2018. Credit: Jeffrey Mcwhorter/Associated Press via The New York Times.

For the victims of the Southern Baptist Convention’s sex abuse coverup, whose stories were hidden, twisted, and heaped with shame to protect spiritual leaders of the SBC as well as to the victim of Pastor John Lowe II, of New Life Christian Church, whose abuse was cast as adultery.

“Then it happened one evening that David arose from his bed and walked on the roof of the king’s house. And from the roof he saw a woman bathing, and the woman was beautiful to behold.” II Samuel 11:2

Religious tradition placed Bathsheba on her roof

performing a striptease for the king—a bullseye 

view of her naked body on display: breasts dripping 

in nectar, smooth curve of her hips that glistened

like jewels, and her pubic hair—a lily between her legs.

Tradition imagines her hands sliding over her wet 

body—washing and touching and rubbing.

It says her beauty brought low God’s anointed 

one. Pastors brand her a stumbling block—

but David cast her from his bed,

his semen trickling out of her like blood.

I imagine she stood, her head bowed, her arms 

embracing her own ravaged body for comfort,

as she shuffled back home and closed her shutters

to shut out the king’s hidden gaze.

I imagine her crouched in the darkness, washing

and washing and rubbing away memory of David’s

hands on her breasts, his mouth on her belly—

memory of him between her legs—but his touch

was branded on her skin, as much a part of her future 

as the seed he planted in her womb. No one calls their child

Bathsheba, a name dripping with shame, though David’s 

namesakes number the stars. She is remembered

as temptress but he as a man after God’s own heart.

Tamara Kreutz is an English Language Arts teacher and a poet who currently resides in Illinois, though she will soon move to Antigua, Guatemala. She began writing poetry early in the pandemic, and through poetry, she found order, peace, and joy in a turbulent, uncertain time.

MY GRANDMOTHER, A SHAMAN, HAS WORDS FOR THOSE WHO VOTED FOR TRUMP

by Ron Riekki

She recites a prayer, or perhaps it’s a curse,
that the souls of the unjust will also have years
to howl, that their revelation will shake their heart

until their cobweb racism awakens the spiders
of their hate and they’re forced to eat the insides
of their insides. She holds in her hand an iron pipe,

invisible, but visible, iron and air, and she sucks
deep on its end, telling me that she is taking away
their stupidity, gullibility, hegemonic ability,

and leaving them on vacation, meaning, etymologically
empty, vacated, so that something other than dumb
sexism can rest in their hollow bones. Her eyes

are fuses. Her skin reels. Her tears are middle
passages, saying we could have made history
but instead we made a bed to fuck the poor.

Behind her, there is no snow. We have assimilated
out of the Arctic, lost our language, bathed
in a drumless Michigan that has turned blood red

from apathy, tricked, pathetic, pricked to death
and not even realizing the rigor mortis. I watch
my mother open her mouth so wide that her lungs

are visible, iron and air, and I wonder if those
so easily swayed, so cinematographically fooled,
would even witness the protests of her body.

Ron Riekki's books include U.P.: a novel (Sewanee Writers Series and Great Michigan Read nominated), The Way North: Collected Upper Peninsula New Works (2014 Michigan Notable Book awarded by the Library of Michigan and finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Award/shortlisted for the Grand Prize, Midwest Book Award, Foreword Book of the Year, and Next Generation Indie Book Award), and Here: Women Writing on Michigan's Upper Peninsula (2016 IPPY/Independent Publisher Book Award Gold Medal Great Lakes—Best Regional Fiction and Next Generation Indie Book Award—Short Story finalist).

RIBBED FROM THE HEADLINES

by Jill Crainshaw

When they strolled in the garden alone while

the dew was still on the apple blossoms, the
man gave the woman all the credit. “She
gave me fruit. I ate.” But as limelight
illuminates Olympic garlands “There’s the guy

responsible for it all!” Her husband. Take a rib
from a Bear’s side; “Wife Wins Medal!” Suture

buttons on free-flowing fabrics to dress up
mannequins on mega-fashion magazine covers;

thirteen cents an hour in undisclosed
back rooms. No one will ever know. Sew up a

presidential nomination; plunge a whetted needle
through “abrasion resistant” waxed canvas ceiling. The
morning headlines? “Clinton claims nomination” stitched
on the front page of the Tribune, history pocketed

in a photo of him, not her. Her clothes asked for it after all,
buried on page twelve bottom left

next to an ad for half price laundry detergent.

Jill Crainshaw is a professor at Wake Forest University School of Divinity and a Presbyterian minister. Her work has appeared in Star 82 Review, Mused: Bella Online Literary Review, and Panoplyzine. She is a frequent contributor to the Unfundamentalist Christians blog.

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).