I’M CARRYING A TORCH (ON VALENTINE’S DAY)

by Lynda Gene Rymond

I’m carrying a torch—
not on a candy heart,
not on a Hallmark card,
not on a clusterfuck of balloons.
 
It’s a real torch, spitting sparks,
heading straight for fourth grade
or whenever this monstrosity
took hold on my little life.
 
Shoeboxes lavishly decorated
with construction paper hearts
in the compulsory pinks and reds,
lavenders and purples.
 
Our names in paint or glitter
above a gingerly cut slit,
mailboxes for all the valentines
posted in time for the party.
 
Room mothers brought cupcakes,
soda punch, boxes of crunchy hearts—
I’m yours, too sweet, oooh la la!
(these flame out nicely in candy colors.)
 
Now the tally. Who got the most? 
Who got the least, again? Who needs to go
to the restroom to flush the crumbs
of a nine-year-old’s self-esteem?
 
Be your own crush! I’ll shout as
I swagger in with my torch ablaze
(Have you ever watched crepe paper burn?)
Forget this shitshow! (New vocabulary word, 
 
shitshow!) No more Valentines! 
No more walking around
with your beating hopeful heart
clenched in your fist.
 
I’m carrying a torch for you, kid,
until you can carry it for yourself.

Lynda Gene Rymond is an author and poet residing in Applebachsville, Pa, where she tends goats, chickens, honeybees and a massive food garden.

3 EXCUSES FOR NOT MARCHING AND THEN A POEM

by Melissa Fite Johnson

A woman wears a Statue of Liberty crown and holds a torch at the Women’s March in New York on Saturday. Credit Sara Hylton/The New York Times via Alaska Dispatch News, January 22, 2017



1. Dry throat I must coat with water or I’ll cough. 
2. Dog-sitting for a friend so she can march. 
3. The angry parent who checked Facebook 
to confirm I’m a liberal teacher.  

He might find this poem.
It makes me squirm, the thought he could take 
my thoughts from my head. My old professor 
always says, It’s easier not to write. 
Today, it was easier not to lurch 
open the garage, turn the key, thrust myself 
into history, into the brave crowd 
filling their lungs with songs instead of doubt. 
My body won’t speck a grainy photograph. 

August 28, 1963, a young girl rested 
her arm on a rail, her head on her arm. The video 
unspools her at “sweltering with the heat of 
oppression.” Every phrase was 
a lighted match. Each flame passed through her. 

January 21, 2017, what words, what fire
I could have carried home like a torch.


Melissa Fite Johnson’s first collection, While the Kettle’s On (Little Balkans Press, 2015), won the Nelson Poetry Book Award and is a Kansas Notable Book.  Her poems have appeared in Valparaiso Poetry Review, Rust + Moth, Broadsided Press, velvet-tail, and elsewhere.  Melissa teaches English and lives with her husband in Kansas.

RESISTANCE

by Joan Colby



You learn to build strength
By resistance. Hoisting the 10 pound weight
With your shattered wrist,
Screwed and bolted into a titanium plate
Inscribed with a disaster you’re
Overcoming.

If passive resistance means folding
Your hands in the semblance of prayer,
The resistance you are practicing
Is one of cold steel clutched
In your fist and lifted
Like the torch of liberty.

Joan Colby has published widely in journals such as Poetry, Atlanta Review, South Dakota Review, The Spoon River Poetry Review, New York Quarterly, the new renaissance, Grand Street, Epoch, and Prairie Schooner. Awards include two Illinois Arts Council Literary Awards, Rhino Poetry Award, the new renaissance Award for Poetry, and an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in Literature. She is the editor of Illinois Racing News, and lives on a small horse farm in Northern Illinois. She has published 11 books including The Lonely Hearts Killers and How the Sky Begins to Fall (Spoon River Press), The Atrocity Book (Lynx House Press), Dead Horses and Selected Poems (FutureCycle Press), and Properties of Matter (Aldrich Press). Colby is also an associate editor of Kentucky Review and FutureCycle Press.