DOES IT UPSET YOU?

by Mariam Saidan

After Audre Lorde’s “A Woman Speaks”

 

I have been woman

for a long time

youth was fragile

scary at times

most of the times

nonadjustable to 

the shape I was becoming.

Misunderstood I was.

Out of mind, troubled

when I didn’t quite like 

the safety of home, 

control or harassment. 

I died many deaths  

each time returning

with a new survivor in me.

Fear no longer suited me. 

I’ve grown into a 

thousand-year-old tree.

They cut a branch,

take a leaf,

it grows back.

It always grows back.

Try and take the sun out

of day. 

There are birds living in me,

one always sings,

and a fox curled up on the shed

just a stone’s throw away in 

my garden, looks at me.

Under my living room where 

I keep vases in different shapes 

and colours, painted and 

filled with wildflowers, 

there’s a cellar

and below that,

an ocean,

pounding.

With every tide 

I become water.

Offending waves.

Dramatic drops.

Vast freedom.

Bewildering imagination.

There’s no end to this thirst.

I’m not scared of pain,

it makes things interesting.

My eyes sometimes

look into yours,

but no, not asking to be

touched.

I’m here

to live this life

like no one but

the woman I have

become. 

I’m not ashamed to

drown in this sea.

Mariam Saidan is a Specialist Advocate for Women’s Rights and has worked as a Children’s Rights Advocate, studied Human Rights Law at Nottingham University (LLM) and Creative Writing at Kent University. She is Iranian, based in London, and has lived in Iran, France, and the UK. She wrote her first journal at 8 years old while living through the Iran-Iraq war.

ON EDGE

by Beth Paulson

NYT, January 14, 2025

It always was where urban met the wild
hilly interface of forest land and city
where on a clear day you could see the sea, 
where roads rose up or meandered into
the steeper, southern side of the San Gabriels. 
 
Today smoky air hangs heavy, sun’s blotted out
where avenues lined with old deodar cedars
grown tall, a firebreak for lucky residents
where we walk uphill from our saved home 
amid downed branches, dangling power lines.
 
The fireman on one corner let us pass
if we promised to head back to our car
down the next road. We don’t talk much,
know sirens in the distance signal fires
still spark and smolder east of Lake Avenue. 
 
Our block of Santa Anita escaped the fire
where this morning knots of neighbors gather
who surely know the line is thin and tenuous
between being a victim or survivor.
We bend to scoop up embers from the grass
 
yet around the corner a home burned to the ground.
A plume of burning gas marks the backyard,
ash pile with charred beams, blackened bricks,
twisted metal, a chimney all that’s standing,
a concrete driveway leading in and out.

Beth Paulson moved recently to Altadena, California from Ouray County, Colorado where she founded the Poetica Workshop, directed Poetry at the Tavern, and served as Poet Laureate. Her poems have been published nationally in over 200 journals and have four times been nominated for Pushcart Prizes.  Luminous (Kelsay Books, 2021) is her sixth collection.  

SURVIVOR'S GUILT: PARKLAND

by Alan Catlin

The mother of a recent graduate told CBS Miami last week that her daughter, Sydney Aiello, had taken her own life. Aiello (pictured above), 19, was a senior at the school during the massacre. One of her friends, Meadow Pollack, was killed. In the year since the shooting, Aiello had struggled with survivor’s guilt and had recently been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, her mother said. During the weekend, word began to spread that another Parkland teenager had also died in what authorities called an “apparent suicide.” The student’s name and age were not released, and authorities said the death was under investigation. Broward Schools Superintendent Robert Runcie announced the student’s death Sunday on Twitter, saying that “a great young man” at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School had committed suicide.” The superintendent added late Sunday night: “In the wake of two suicides that shocked the community this past week, parents & representatives from organizations throughout Broward County came together today to discuss what we can do to help students at MSD and children throughout the county cope with trauma and depression.” —The Washington Post, March 22, 2019

Not all school shooting
victims are physically
wounded

Bear no visible scars
though everyone was
aware of what happened

That she had been there,
and, somehow,
she survived through no
fault of her own

Some watched as their
best friends died while they
were unscathed

All felt helpless and knew
they would never be
the same after-that day-

She fell into a deep depression

Felt despair

Not even daily Yoga helped

It is impossible to empty
your mind after something
like that

“No one knew how I felt.”
She said.

Her best friend’s father
insisted, “He did.”
Of course, he did

“Killing yourself is not the answer.”

All the parents understand

Her friends who survived knew
what she meant

But it wasn’t enough

Sydney Aiello was 19
when she died.


Alan Catlin has published dozens of chapbooks and full-length books, most recently the chapbook Three Farmers on the Way to a Dance (Presa Press), a series of ekphrastic poems responding to the work of German photographer August Sander who did portraits of Germans before, during, and after both World Wars.

SHE WHO IS IN BED AT NOON

by W. D. Bumsted-Hind

"Girl Asleep" by Martin Wells <@mwportraits>

She has been too near a shooter,
She has fled a forest fire,
She has become a president,
She has lost two classmates.
She is twenty.
She is both strong and weak,
Secure and insecure.
She is happy and sad.
Home in her old bed,
She is nestled up like a cocoon,
Asleep still at noon.
Trying to repair all that’s broken.
Don’t let yourself fall down,
Get up.
Be present,
Be alive.
Put on your war paint,
Iron your hair,
Sharpen your claws,
Fly free again.


W. D. Bumsted-Hind, JD/PhD, is Vice President for University Affairs at the University of Nebraska.  She has published poems in several journals including The Healing Muse and Blood and Thunder. Her poem "My Tattoos" was featured on New York Public Radio.

WOMAN IN MUD

by Alejandro Escudé




She is trudging
for her own life
through sodden timber
like lice in hair,
and there are others
watching her climb out
like a thin spider
from a toilet bowl,
powerless to aid her,
no hero helicopter,
no rescue roughs
in floaty, neon gear,
only these mud people
she crawls toward,
lying exhausted
on the debris-less flats,
a fallen, mucky statue
of Liberty Leading
the People, fatigued
yet still radiant
in that silt salt, barely
moving, a thing
no more, a monument,
a figure of nothing.


Alejandro Escudé published his first full-length collection of poems My Earthbound Eye in September 2013. He holds a master’s degree in creative writing from UC Davis and teaches high school English. Originally from Argentina, Alejandro lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two children.

REQUIEM FOR VESNA VULOVIC

by Devon Balwit

A Serbian woman who survived what was said to be a 10,000-metre (33,000ft) fall after a plane exploded in mid-air in 1972 has died aged 66. Vesna Vulović  (above in 1972 AP photo) was found dead by her friends in her apartment in Belgrade, Serbian state television reported. The cause of death was not immediately known. In January 1972 she was working as a flight attendant a Yugoslav Airlines DC-9 plane when it blew up over the snowy mountain ranges of what was then Czechoslovakia. All of the other 27 passengers and crew on board died.Initially paralysed from the waist down, Vulović eventually made almost a full recovery and even returned to work for the airline in a desk job. She never regained memory of the accident or her rescue. She said in 2008 that she could only recall greeting passengers before takeoff from the airport in Denmark, and then waking up in hospital with her mother at her side. She went on to put her celebrity at the service of political causes, protesting against Slobodan Milošević’s rule in the 1990s and later campaigning for liberal forces in elections. —The Guardian, December 24, 2016

The nervous begged to sit beside her on planes,
figuring anyone who had plummeted 33,000 feet
and lived had lucky coiled into her DNA.  Her fall
made her a mosaic reassembled by doctors and
by will.  Changed by gravity, she spoke out,
unafraid to call a butcher’s hands blood-dipped,
even if it cost her job.  The tiniest stone can clog
an engine, resisting from where it’s hurled.

Devon Balwit is a poet and educator from Portland, Oregon. She has a chapbook Forms Most Marvelous forthcoming from dancing girl press (summer 2017). Her recent poems can be found in: Oyez, The Cincinnati Review, Red Paint Hill, The Ekphrastic Review, TheNewVerse.News, Noble Gas Quarterly, Timberline Review, Trailhead Magazine, Vector, and Permafrost.

CONSTRUCTING A NEW LANGUAGE

by Megan Merchant

“Perhaps Trump is the ultimate gift to feminists: a grabber and bragger who has focused the world’s attention on the outrages women quietly endure on a chronic basis without notice. And perhaps we can now see the mid-90s response to Bill Clinton’s own accusers — subdued or defensive among liberals on account of his women-friendly politics — as a near miss of an opportunity, a cultural shift that could have built on the momentum of Anita Hill, but never did. The stories emerging about Trump, as well as his own words, could give women a new way of seeing their own experiences with sexual assault going forward — as part of a pattern of male behavior that has been noted, flagged and loudly denigrated.” —Susan, Dominus, The New York Times, October 13, 2016

There is a story that begins with a father
giving his son a bag of nails and instructions

to pound one into the fence with each flare of anger
and at first, there were more than three dozen,

then two, then a single day without a slip.
The son was proud, said “Dad, look.”

He nodded, continued “Now, for each day
you stay calm, pull a nail. What do you see ?”

A fence with scars.

And some in our country will say that’s
where the light gets through, or you won’t notice

if we build the fence bigger,
or the holes are there—get over it,

but the CDC has recorded that one in every five
women in our country is raped,

and that’s only what’s reported, their kits neatly
packaged, sit on a shelf, twenty deep to a bin.

The room stuffed with scars and swabs.
The nail hammered in, torn out.

And what if I told you that almost half
were before age eighteen. But numbers blur.

You think there can’t be that many, say hysteria,
drama, revenge, lying bitch.

So I ask, where does anger go ? If not packaged
in bullets and bombs, it stews in the mouth,

tingles down to hands. Drugs, rubs, robs.
Leaves holes.

Have you ever noticed the way women
walk in the dark ? Arms crossed over breasts,

clutching her body, because it is a thing that
can be taken.

If you are willing to listen,
you will learn the language of trauma.

A gospel of mirrors
and a man with a mouth full of nails

claiming words don’t matter. But they do.

Stories come into being to save lives.
To warn others from danger.

Anyone who has survived will tell you,

the human responsibility is to do more
than just listen.

Megan Merchant is mostly forthcoming. She is the author of two full-length poetry collections: Gravel Ghosts (Glass Lyre Press) The Dark’s Humming (Winner of the 2015 Lyrebird Prize, Glass Lyre Press, forthcoming 2017); four chapbooks and a forthcoming children’s book with Philomel Books. She lives in the tall pines of Prescott, Arizona.

LAST LUNCH MENU

by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

An original menu from the last first-class lunch served aboard the ill-fated Titanic has sold for $88,000 to a private collector at an online auction. —CNN, October 2, 2015

For the last lunch on the Titanic,
the kitchen served corned beef and dumplings.
We know because one of the men
who was saved in a lifeboat
kept his menu with him,
and over a hundred years later
someone bought the old scrap of paper
for eighty-eight thousand bucks.

My friends, just in case I die tonight,
and just in case it’s a dramatic,
exciting death, I want you to know
that for lunch I had Lay’s potato chips
and a Caribbean Spice smoothie
with protein powder. I didn’t
save the menu, I know, what a bummer.
But it’s written in chalk on the wall
at Heidi’s Brooklyn Deli, and if you take
a picture, well, somewhere down the centuries
it might just make a fortune for your kids.

Unlike that lucky survivor, I don’t happen to have
a Turkish bath ticket I can send you.
Too bad. I would have loved one today.
But perhaps at auction
you can make a few extra bucks
if you throw in the knowledge
that the sunflowers were in full bloom,
and the cottonwood trees were golden,
though it was already October 3.

The whole sale would be more profitable
if only I were more famous. Sorry.
Oh yes. Two pickles. I nearly forgot to mention.
They throw them in free with the kids’ sandwiches,
but those pickles might be worth a lot to you.
I hope not many others will die in this disaster,
but know that I am aware as I write this
that there is a sweet danger brewing,
and there are no life boats.


Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer lives in Southwest Colorado. Her poems have appeared in O Magazine, on A Prairie Home Companion, in back alleys and on river rocks. One-word mantra: Adjust.