Saturday, January 14, 2017

Poems of Resistance, Power & Resilience – Albert DeGenova

Close up image of a microphone on a stage. The audience that is facing the microphone is blurred, appearing as a myriad of colors (red, white, green, yellow, etc.)
As the incoming administration builds its agenda of attack on marginalized people, on freedom of speech, on the earth itself, poetry will continue to be an essential voice of resistance. Poets will speak out in solidarity, united against hatred, systemic oppression, and violence and for justice, beauty, and community.

In this spirit, Split This Rock is offering its blog as a Virtual Open Mic. For the rest of this frightening month, January of 2017, we invite you to send us poems of resistance, power, and resilience.

We will post every poem we receive unless it is offensive (containing language that is derogatory toward marginalized groups, that belittles, uses hurtful stereotypes, etc.). After the Virtual Open Mic closes, we hope to print out and mail all of the poems to the White House.

For guidelines on how to submit poems for this call, visit the Call for Poems of Resistance, Power & Resilience blog post


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After the election of 2016, tell the awful truth
by Albert DeGenova

Needing to indulge my sadness in hot sauce and an illicit beer I take my lunch hour at Buffalo Wild Wings
where I sit within eye-shot of 19 TVs where six different football uniforms parade and battle, where 
golfers miss putts, where commentators critique last Sunday’s quarterback and all the sound on all the 
TVs is turned down, drowned by a constant dance beat, the lyrics unintelligible in the din of laughter and 
happy birthday echoing echoing echoing as if the seas didn’t part, the tectonic plates didn’t shift, the 
world hasn’t begun to spin backward, all our rivers flowing in reverse.  The voters are back to their soma 
of sports and carbohydrates in this Brave New World that is not a fiction.  I write one true sentence, our 
only last defense -- Bear witness.

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