Today’s Gender
Alok Vaid-Menon said
“Having a body is perpetual drag
because I’m a soul first,
which means the rest is all dress up and play.”
If gender is a performance,
you get to be your own costume designer.
Today’s gender:
Background character in a depressing sci-fi movie.
Today’s gender:
Works at a bookshop with no discernable organization system
and also a resident cat.
Today’s gender:
Gardening mom on a newly terraformed planet.
Today’s gender:
If a poem by Edgar Allan Poe had a child with a thrift store.
Your soul is sunsets and the scent of lemon-rosemary scones,
your body contains atoms breathed out by Eleanor Roosevelt
and Amelia Earhart when they ditched a White House dinner
to fly a plane in evening gowns,
(true story),
and your clothes exist
only to make you happy,
so be the
background character,
bookshop owner
gardening mom,
poem-slash-thrift store
of your dreams.
Literally nothing is stopping you.
—Heather L Nicholson—
Local Politics
I turn away from those who know
what is right, no matter how
right they are. Or left.
—Danny Rosen—
Building Alliances
“There’s been too many ripoffs for too long”
-Leo Lyyoki (aka Navajo Sam)
If I had a hammer
& not the one that busted
in my hands as organizers are
busted for planting
trade union pegs
to stretch the corporate tent
A hammer that wouldn’t
buckle under
to repeated blows
Merciless sun baking sidewalks
Tools pushed to their limits
Snapping under pressure
If I had a hammer
forged of the Mother’s fury
yet tempered with love
for all her relations
two-legged four-legged
buried stone or spiraling seed
A hammer shaped to
the will of the people
Nothing could stop us
from driving a nail through
the heart of the beam
to begin the reconstruction
Building alliances
powerful as the wind
that rips a roof to shreds
or sweeps a prairie clean
—Art Goodtimes—
Unseen
A greasy pile of
blankets and clothes
getting soaked by sprinklers
at dawn.
Middle of a new sidewalk,
businesses with perfect landscaping
manicured.
there is a poem
in that pile of rags.
A story
some mystery.
What late night doings
transpired here?
Where is the person
that belongs to these
off-castings?
Arrested maybe?
Flashing reds and blues
old warrants
testy cops.
“Do you have anything sharp
in your pockets?”
Tight handcuffs
unpaid fines
punishment for being poor.
Drunk tanks
and bad food.
Kidnapped?
Unlikely
Or did they collapse:
EMT’s
chest compressions
narcan
hospital bed
coffin?
Maybe raptured?
Taken up
having walked the walk.
144 Thousand souls total
12 Thousand from each
of the 12 tribes of Israel
read revelations.
Would we even notice the rapture?
Not enough Christians
washing the feet
of the poor.
The rapture would not make
the 5pm news.
Maybe the burden
just became too much.
Buddha said
that all possessions are prisons.
An act of Liberation?
Too much to carry
too hard to clean.
We can rule out aliens.
A pile of dirty rags
the end of a story
a new chapter
a bad segue
or maybe a new beginning.
—Jacob Richards—
The Revolutionist 