Category: The Last Word

Poetry: “Night Snake” by Jennifer Martelli

I try to bend my backto the sadness. The moon grows backfat, a yellow scythe. Perseus decapitatesthe head of the Gorgon, snakes litter the cold sky, just asdangerous dead. My friend found one blacksnake head, one rat’s tail, juniper budswaxy & strewn in her yard after a quiet night.Anything I’ve ever feared regenerated, camearound on…
Poetry: “The Demagogue Diet” by Samantha Zighelboim

I ate my way through the debates, the conventions,that interminable election night. I ate through my classes in the days after, trying to console my students. While youappointed your cabinet of brutes, I was eating. I’ve eaten through the terrified phone calls, the sad texts. I atewhile my friends marched in the streets and I…
Poetry: “The Morning After the 2016 Presidential Election” by Lynn Marie Houston

So much dependson the two lesbiansacross the streetwho turn offthe morning news,leave still-steamingcoffee on the table,eggs uneaten on plates,and walk hand-in-handto the mud roomof their white colonialwhere they gatherthe American flag(so heavy nowit takes both of themto lift it),open the front doorlike they do every dayand place it in its holder. Lynn Marie Houston is…
Five Poems by Eleanor Levine

The Day After I’m crying for you America.For all the bullies who have picked on you.Knotted your hair in a twist.Soaked your face in leeches.Perpetuated myths about your reality.Sunk you in the apple barrel and pushed you deeper into it.Made you drown, but let you breathe, only to worry you might drown again.I am sorry…
Three Poems by Stevie Edwards

Five Days Before the Election & I don’t want to feel the earth today because a rich man is in itwho says he has the right to grab the most mine thing I can think of but maybe wouldn’t want tobecause maybe I am almost thirty & have grown stately in myself these last three years,watched ass…
Poetry & Song: “My Joyous Crown” by Nancy Christensen King & Alani Keiser

My Joyous Crown (Poem by Nancy Christensen King) Calculating and deliberateAs Flamenco dancers’ feet,You tapped and stomped upon my heartControlling every beat. Frightening, yet soothingLoyalty became,A necessary melodyMy freedom to defame. Like a raging fireLeaves no stick unburned,The marrow of my spiritTo ashen ruins turned. Until I could not bearThe weight of heavy hands,A voice…
Essay: “Return to Pleasantville” by Tabitha Blankenbiller

In the 1998 film Pleasantville, one of my favorites according to my college MySpace page, an alternate-universe, black-and-white TV town undergoes a metamorphosis. Led by the arrival of achingly young Tobey McGuire and Reese Witherspoon from our world, the small world residents are introduced to the foreign concepts of sex, art, and literature—revolution by proxy,…
Poetry: “American Beast” by Tara Campbell

It enters on soft pawsand nuzzles your cheekand tells you it’s okay.It says it’s not your faultyour father lost his jobor is working threeor isn’t there at all. It prowls your houseand tickles your chin with Its whiskersand says it’s not your mother’s faultshe’s too tired to play with you.Mommy has to sit, It purrs,…