Solidarity With Ferguson

no justice, no peace
because a white man who shoots people en masse
is given sympathy, excuses, a name, a face,
a story,
whilst an unarmed black boy riddled with bullets
who lies on the street for four hours,
who puts his hands in the air and says
“don’t shoot”
is labelled DANGEROUS.

no justice, no peace
because who needs dystopia in books
when it’s on our tvs, in our news
in our streets,
when we care more about stolen
goods than stolen lives and when
people say “we all bleed the same colour”
but ignore the fact that not everyone
will be made to bleed.

no justice, no peace
because we are told to be calm,
to be accepting, to be peaceful,
to show care and to show restraint
when none of this was offered
to mike brown.

no justice, no peace
because unity isn’t about ignoring injustice;
because restraint should be exercised by
those who hold the power, not
forced onto those who live in fear;
because our anger shouldn’t be
worse than their excuses, because
the law isn’t colourblind and
it shouldn’t just serve those who
act in its name.

no justice, no peace
because a boy was killed, and the
colour of his skin made it legal.

By A. Clark

Biography:

A.Clark is a 20 year old anarcha-feminist studying sociology in Cambridge, UK. They really like dogs and think that selfies are revolutionary. More of their writing is at vellichar.tumblr.com

The Preacher’s Daughter Who Loved a Boy Like Religion

The preacher’s daughter
tasted like peaches.

Peaches and that dust that
hangs from back roads as

cars pass like a red haze
of not knowing. She had

bruises on her knees, but
not from what you’d think.

There was a boy. There always
was. His name was Gospel if

there was ever such a name.
He tasted like railroad tracks.

His mind was so much bigger
than her. She thought one

night that she might drown in it.
He would sometimes point up

at all the stars in the sky and he’d
say, “Some of those are already dead.

We’re looking millions of years into
the past.” And she’d look at him

and she’d think that maybe
she’d like to be one of those ghost

stars if it meant
he was looking at her

By Shelby Asquith

Once Bitten, Twice Shy

on the fourth of july there are fireworks
inside and out. someone is hissing in the corner
about the ‘trashy bitch all over him’ and i wince,
as if i have broken some kind of law against
talking to sweet doe-eyed boys who don’t put their hands
anywhere you don’t want them. we are sitting
in a circle with upside-down playing cards and something
is being said about doing it in the ass. boys and girls
are laughing and i don’t know how to pretend
that any of this is fun.

two weeks later there is porn on the laptop screen
and a woman is screaming. he’s slapping her face
and her eyes might as well be glass when he rams
into her. i cross my legs as tight as they will go.
i wonder how many times i have had glass eyes.
i’ve always dreamed of rapture but all i get
are dry hands and no lube, a stinging between my legs
and a burn in my cheeks saying this can’t keep
happening.

they call girls like me vanilla.

what they don’t know is that i used to grab my boyfriend
by the shirt collar, push him to the wall and bite
his lip. what they don’t know is that i used to make him
beg.

they call girls like me prudes.

what they don’t know is that a different boy spent two years
going in dry. what they don’t know is that he made me bleed
and made me choke and now i cannot lay my hands on a boy
without shaking.

without praying, pleasebegood pleasebesoft pleasebekind
pleasegoslowly.

it’s a different apartment but the people and the game
haven’t changed a bit. there is a silent tantrum
on the balcony and the boy is showing me a picture
of his cat. we have both been hurt but tonight we aren’t
thinking of pain. someone holds up a camera and we smile
but he doesn’t pull me in. i think i might be flying. someone
turns the screen toward us and in between the solo cups
all we can see is hope.

By Jones Howell

Biography:

Jones Howell is a graduate of the Northwestern University Robert R. McCormick School of Engineering and Judd A. and Marjorie Weinberg Creative Writing (Fiction) sequence. She grew up on the Maryland waterfront, went to school by Lake Michigan, and now calls suburban Georgia home. She misses the sea. She has been writing, in some form or another, for over ten years. She maintains a poetry blog at joneshowell.tumblr.com.

Syntax

Trauma does not wear a name tag.
Every time I try to tell a therapist
or a friend or an audience what
happened to me, I cross off a
new term in permanent marker.

Saying the word “abuser” has always
left my heart in a cold sweat. Adding
a determiner only makes everything
worse. My abuser. That just makes
every window inside of me shatter,
makes all of the dogs howl, makes
every train blast my eardrums into
a new millennium.

I am always looking for the quickest
way to tell someone who needs
to know. How fast can I say,
I was 13 and looking for a friend
online? Or, I was afraid to tell him
no?

Or even:

I don’t know what his hands felt like,
only what they could type out
in a room only lit by the green light
of a laptop screen. But he knows
what my body looks like wearing
nothing but the mirror. He could
identify every part of me on a table.
How does that make you feel?
Because it makes me feel like I need
to be believed.

Goddamn it, I wish I could be
a good survivor. I wish I could
have a memory that is not full
of broken cameras and area codes.
If every word I use to try and
explain my past makes me want
to recoil back into the comfort
of flight-or-freeze, how will
I ever get past the beginning
of it all?

A determiner makes everything
worse. My abuser.

The thing is, I don’t want to think of him
as mine, because he always thought of me
as his.

By Lydia Havens

Biography:

Lydia Havens writes and lives in Tucson, Arizona. A part of the literary non-profit Spoken Futures, her work has previously been published in Drunk in a Midnight Choir, Words Dance, and Textploit, among other places. In March 2015, she was named the Women of the World Poetry Slam Youth Champion. You can find more of her work on Tumblr, southwestwitch.tumblr.com, or on her website, lydiahavens.weebly.com.

New gods

I am queen of cats and moon, headlight lamps
and sidewalk weeds; we stopped our odes to
the everyday and altars fall to crumbled dust-

this world goes ever on and all the kings
are buried deep; we must crown ourselves if
we hope to keep the sacred numbers strung-

the holy revenants will turn to dust,
diamonds cracked around grinning bones;
I will be the queen of crows of feathers stuck

in chain link fences-

I cannot do this on my own; drop your wreathes
for interred things; the dead listen but they can’t
speak and the wishes they know how to grant

won’t mean much to us these days; we need
kings and queens of streetlamp games of spinning
tires on abandoned bikes, we need princes of

abandoned chalk-art, lion tamers for the night that
falls in smoke and burning leaves, the season turns and
radiant heaves of light left down for the dying time-

we’re all we have to light the fires, all that’s left
in sweet-spiced mist; we need gods of cobwebs
and corners, gods of forgotten baseball bats gods

of all the lived-in things we pray to wordless,
and complete- the sacrifice cannot drain; come
crown yourself in tin-foil circlets-

we need gods for these latter days.

By Lindsay Maruska

Biography:

Lindsay Maruska is a thirty-year-old forever student who is pursuing a second MA degree while raising one child and five dogs. She is interested in modern mythology and the intersection of regional gothic and social commentary on industrial ruin.