Math for Girls Counts

Before they were great, great grandmothers, they stood 

in lines for singular equality, for one scale blind 

to gender, creed or color. But, their right 

to vote was delayed until 1920 – 144 years after

propertied White men, 51 years after Black men,

as if women were mere household amenities

used as conveniences.

The vote hoped to move the line closer 

to a public voice in fiscal and sexual values,  

but it took sixteen more years to change 

birth control info from obscene 

to legal mail (hidden in plain brown envelopes)

to head-of-the-household husbands,

a married man the only 

Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. 

Connecticut’s 1965 defeat freed the pill 

only for the sanctified wedded. I remember 

unmarried, pregnant girls, 

shamed and blamed for bad choices, 

while the boys were just being boys. 

The 1982 ERA defeat subtracted sixty years 

of female rights. One hundred years since suffrage,

fifteen states still have not ratified ERA,

now a dusty museum piece. 

Defeat meant I had no credit, no bank account, 

no property without my husband’s name, addressed as 

Mrs. John Doe, my first name unimportant,

a nondescript dustpan beneath spousal steps.

Reduced fraction of 1973’s Roe vs. Wade, reproductive rights 

are not in the corporate equation that controls

choice as newly-deemed religious bodies, 

a catch-22 where working women have zero say. 

Despite the centuries-old male monopoly, women have 

done the math – equal means equal, not less than.

© Patsy Asunción, 2017

"The Awakening" by Henry Mayer, 1915
Restoration copyright by Adam Cuerden
from Wikimedia Commons 

The Warrior (or After Surgery)

Reluctantly, I force myself

to stand before the mirror,

stripped of all artifice,

naked except for earrings.

Reminded of a warrior after many battles,

I note the scar stretching 

from sternum to armpit,

fading now but marking

where once there was a breast.

I feel unbalanced, bereft,

but then I see the head,

eyes watchful,

able to enjoy color and form;

ears, somewhat large,

but able to hear bird-song and blues,

Beethoven and Brahms;

mouth, lopsided and quizzical,

but able to converse 

and even sing a bit.

The top of the skull

is covered by wispy, graying hair.

Within it is a brain

with thoughts and emotions, 

and most of all

the ability to enjoy,

to appreciate, and to love.

So I honor the gift of my Maker,

who made me in Her image,

and the gift of time

to enjoy Her creation a little longer.

© Peg Latham,  1993

Mrs. Prince, after surgical removal of a breast
Watercolor of a woman operated on for breast cancer, 1841
from Wikimedia Commons
via Wellcome Images

Grooming the Herd in Spring

Beneath these gloved hands

Cowhide on horsehide inseparable

The winter coats fly off in tufts

Revealing the darker the sleeker

The more radiant summer skin.

Down flanks rubbing dried mud

From hocks and fetlocks brushing

Botfly larvae from cannon bones

This heifer’s hide gives its all

In an anointing of earth to earth.

Tonight out in the eastern paddock 

They graze on in watery darkness

Invisible yet shining with a patina 

That only open-handed love knows

How to coax again when the rain 

and the new mud come.

© Bill Prindle, 2017

Arab Simeon Stud
Photo by Jimmy Baikovicius
from Wikimedia Commons

THE CHARLESTON MASSACRE, JUNE 2015

(For the nine church members in Bible study murdered by a white supremacist)

Streaming blood, the Bibles flap their wings;

Pages become wings, the wings of strong angels.

The Bibles spray blood over the listening Earth

Like words we must read in order to survive.

The blood is like the trail made by dazzling jets:

The Bibles rise like thrones into heralding heaven.

Each Bible is a throne bearing up a wise victim,

A martyr singing of love and mercy

High over horror, the sanctuary defiled

Once again befouled, violated

By a blank secessionist for the country of blankness

Testifying to hate’s supremacy.

The flag of blankness must be honored

By minds that are blank, giddy with pride

In rebellion against the human, despising all color.

They turn the beauty of the city into old sad sin,

Its crime against the Union of love and justice.

Hate’s flag will not be lowered; love’s flag bows in shame.

Blankness must recreate the Confederation of inhumanity—

The sanctuary of color, of life is refuted.

But the church of mercy has changed into a chalice,

A huge chalice filled with the blood of the killed.

The church brims with blood like the wine of kindness,

The redness of blackness, the color of love.

Even in victory, the unloving stay unloving—

Exposed to kindness, he must murder the kind.

But kindness is sustained on the wings of those bibles

And the church is a chalice offered to heaven,

The wine of wisdom, the oblation of souls.

Our Union must be preserved by love and mercy,

By courage and justice, the strength of the kind.

Blood streams from those Bibles

In words we must read:

We are one in diversity, naked Union of hope.

The fragile city is beautiful,

But its sins have been horrible.

It asks to be forgiven,

But it must not sin again.

May rainbow people thrive

In the joyous color of its markets;

May the pastel mild elegance

Of the city survive.

For blankness is loyal only to blankness

And will stay desolate forever

In evil isolation.

The Union of love and mercy, color with color,

Justice with kindness is never alone.

Honor the redness of blackness, honor all color,

Kindness and courage, the song of the strong.

Note: The terrorist Roof, who had no sheltering roof yet could not accept courteous sanctuary, despising all affectionately protective roofs, deceived himself into thinking he was aristocratic white. In fact, he was blank. Blankness is not a color. All color is lovely—black or white shining.  Roof believed in the supremacy of gunlove, the sovereignty of ignorance. He expected that his hopeless blankness would grant him pleasingly grim self-justification, the light of the loser. He thought the murderous refutation of otherness is power. With skill-less urgency, he would paint his blankness in blood, giving his blankness the insignia of specious superiority. But his blankness gets blanker and blander as long as he dourly dubiously lives. This is gunlove, the emptiness of solipsistic ignorant sovereignty. Roof is not white. He is blank. Clementa Pinckney and his studiously charming martyred friends, are victorious in establishing a better city of kindness and justice, equally and delicately pastel as the beauty of the older sinning city. The amiably raucous color of its market will live, will thrive even more.  Terror over the Earth is unreal murderous rule, fake law , the rage of blankness. Only the blood of love, of courage and kindness, knows how to paint soul, actual art. The reign of dearth and fear over the Earth kills but is idiot illusion. Earth is the loveliest of unmurderous hues, the true spectrum of you, of thou. Relinquish killing animals, grass, people. Unpoison the air.

Acknowledge the gorgeous, ensouling, reviving, healing flag of the rainbow. Race is not real. Life only is valid hope and possible power. The tears of good humans are real. Accept the thrill of otherness, your gifted and giving self, the life of thou and I—joy. Everything that exists in this shattered light is holy. For it has conquered nothingness. Gather the shattered light.

      © Stephen Margulies, 2017

Four winged angels
Stained glass by J. & R. Lamb Studios
Wikimedia Commons

The Game of Life

It’s a game called life

With treasures lost

Loves, friends, jobs, opportunities

Ne’er to come again.

What went astray?

Perhaps to have played a piece differently

Just one small maneuver

Might have brought another outcome.

But we cannot make those changes

Yesterday’s chance gone..

So we breathe deeply and jump ahead

Preparing for more of the game.

© Shelly Sitzer, 2017

Four Gods Playing Checkers
from Sadao, Thailand
Photo by Photo Dharma
from Wikimedia Commons

Language

This land grows language like another crop:

metaphors shining like daylilies against dark pines:

a man with a whiskey still is midnight farming

a Carolina credit card siphons gas

from someone’s tank into yours

river bottoms lush with similes:

I’ll get on you like stink on a skunk

useless as tits on a bull

compliments bloom delicate as honeysuckle:

smooth as a baby’s bottom

pretty as a speckled pup

alliteration twines round your tongue like morning glories:

tight as a tick

hotter’n the hinges of hell

He don’t know shit from Shinola

sharp nettles of judgment holding on among rocks:

crooked as a dog’s hind leg

not worth the salt to make his bread

thinks he’s too good for the buzzards

tall forests of hyperbole:

so drunk he couldn’t hit the floor with his hat

too dumb to pour piss out of a boot

if the directions was on the heel

He’d screw a snake if you’d hold it still

Like heirloom seed collected and saved,

the old varieties to be savored;

And crossbreeds, mutations, pure inventions:

come a good rain, new varieties would spring up

in unexpected places.

The old man smiled and kept busy

during the long quiet hours

when there was no one to talk to,

cultivating the dusty paths of speech.

             © David Black, 2017

Speckled Bluetick Coonhound puppy
Photo from River Styx Scent Hounds

Revenge Play

In the creator’s brutal universe,

gentle exceptions seem abnormal.

I dwell on the fate of my departed friends,

live out their love affairs in my imagination,

bolt away when I hear their steps behind me —

the dead shouldn’t engage in my game.

My shiny hair is tied back in a ponytail,

theirs is unkempt and decayed.

They try to invent 

ways to be heard and revenged,

but I am uncommitted and detached,

now trying on their fates in my mental fitting room.

Nothing mysterious under the veneer of humans.

Prince Hamlet isn’t the only one

who speaks with his father’s ghost;

ghosts camp in my overheated head in the night,

complain, whine, and demand revenge.

I put a lot of stock in ghosts’ sermons,

but see no practical use for their revelations.

Burdening Hamlet with his pending problem,

using his son to get even with Claudius

makes the royal ghost an unreliable authority —

I renounce such a heritage.

The tide was in, the tide is out

on the shore at Elsinore.

We are all unavenged at the end.

Our sons are unburdened,

freed from our lament.

© Helen Kanevsky, 2017

Prince Hamlet kills King Claudius
by Gustave Moreau
from Wikimedia Commons