1/20/2017 0 Comments Two Poems by John GreySing Her Song What else can she do? She can’t knit it. Or pound it into the pavement. She’s on stage. There’s a band behind her. They’re not going to play while she hisses or cuddles a tabby cat. And the audience is at the ready. We didn’t pay good money to watch someone scratch lottery tickets with a dime or clip her toenails. It’s all about this pact between the lot of us. If she doesn’t sing her song, it’s broken. Imagine that. She recites the alphabet and the band disperses in disgust. She eats some cannoli and the crowd ask for their money back. It’s all about a technique where lungs act as bellows. the larynx doubles for a reed, and the chest and head cavities amplify. There’s no tapping fingers on a table involved. No lighting a candle. It’s the external intercostals, scalenes and sternocleidomastoid muscles that need to get to work. And the vocal cords of course. The knees and the knuckles need to stay out of it. I’m no different from anyone else. I have a ticket. I want to hear the woman sing. If I want clicking teeth, I have you. Or a sneeze, there’s the man behind me. Here she is stepping up to the microphone. So remember, woman. You’re here to sing into it not repair the blessed thing. Why You Go Unnoticed The effect of your condition is that no one is ever sure of you being where you are, your very subtlety dooms your advance and that voice just isn’t big enough. So delicate your mesh of beauty and intelligence, it merely vibrates on a smaller scale unlike the rowdy, self-important who shove surfaces in each other’s faces. You choose the recess while they take to the microphone, employ a sliver of mirror and not the full body length variety. They’re uncomfortable in their own silence. You have only ever been stable from within. But this a world where a vacuum on a pedestal is preferred to what’s going on behind that gentle expression. These others are loud and visible to the core. Nobody yet has cut themselves and bled serenity. Bio: John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident. Recently published in New Plains Review, Stillwater Review and Big Muddy Review with work upcoming in Louisiana Review, Columbia College Literary Review and Spoon River Poetry Review.
0 Comments
November 9, 2016 Your legs pump like automatons as you wade through wind and gulp the air your walker’s trance blurs the cedars a green line between gray driveways where a mental mote catches and etches the shape of a ghost car transparent at first then the color red a semi-compact, windows soaped in words brewed by devils the sucker-punch of hate slams you into a friend’s history the Nazi boy at school in Hamburg with his straight salute but her arm ached on her war's first day everything after involved fleeing fear engulfs you this quiet neighborhood was never safe you just didn’t see its demons until today Bio: Peggy Turnbull is a poet and retired academic librarian who lives in Wisconsin. She is currently writing a series of poems about her encounters with the divine. Most recently she has been published in Whitmanthology: On Loss and Grief. 1/20/2017 2 Comments Three Poems by Cathryn SheaA Nobody with an Infected Middle Finger On the right hand, the one that flips the bird, cut on kitty’s litter box. It could be fatal, a germy intrusion, private invasion of a public finger. (Trump is a germaphobe. Says he.) (Trump is a misogynistic mysophobe. Says we.) The sister of the Blackwater founder wears a designer flak jacket. Her finger is stuck on the end of a pencil, stuck in the desk of her new office at the State Department. The State has many departments, like a department store: Housing- wares, Under garments. Under Secretary of Garments. Secretaries with secret scary agendas. When you’re in Government being a Secret- ary is prestigious. Secret- aries are debonaire, have savior faire. The new Prez is laissez-faire. Race of Arms She loves her arms, she loves her arms, she loves her arms. And she loves her arms. It’s snowing at my house. We don’t keep the heat up as high as we want, we wear sweatshirts. It’s not that we hate arms. We are snow blind. On TV bare arms make us shiver, all those tanks and shifts, shifts and tanks. We shiver in our timbers. All the ladies on TV love to show their arms. Black, white, yellow, pink. The NRA loves arms. Melania loves arms. Trump loves Melania’s arms. He loves Ivanka’s arms. Russia loves arms. Daesh* hides arms under black burkas. *Acroynm for Arabic al-Dawla al-Islamiya fi al-Iraq wa al-Sham Journey to Rational Decisions 1. Proust, at night in 1914 in the cloistered embrace of a cork-lined room, the faint sound of artillery. Paranoia in society. Anyone who remained aloof, embroiled in extremes of emotion, this febrile world. The avant-garde. Radicals [and a few fascists] on the left. Fascists [and a few dictators] on the right. Well-told jokes and optimism as businesses fold ... 2. Look at this wheat in the early summer of 1931. Gold and fat. 200 million acres of sod turned on the Texas Panhandle. They had removed the native prairie grass, a web of perennial species that had evolved over twenty thousand years. By the end of 1931 dust made it a different land-- 3. The cenotaph memorializing August 6, 1945. Monday … dawn pellucid and bright, a warm and somnolent day. Near Hiroshima Castle, kurogane (black steel) holly trees radiated survive to this day. 4. The bathroom of the President’s Bedroom, January 21, 2017. 2:00 am. Faint glow. A bluebird icon on an iPhone. The President types with his index fingers and clicks. “He’s going to get us all killed" becomes a new meme. Bio: Cathryn Shea’s poetry has recently appeared in After the Pause, Permafrost, Rust + Moth, Tinderbox, and elsewhere. Cathryn’s second chapbook, It’s Raining Lullabies, is forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press in 2017. She has poems forthcoming in 2017 anthologies, including “Luminous Echoes: A Poetry Anthology” by Into The Void and “The New English Verse” by Cyberwit.net. Cathryn serves on the editorial staff for Marin Poetry Center. She lives in Fairfax, CA. See www.cathrynshea.com and @cathy_shea on Twitter. Stop Calling Trump an Outsider Major media outlets reported on the “stunning victory” of an “outsider” over his opponent, whom many have have argued was the most qualified candidate in decades, on November 9th and again when the Electoral College confirmed his victory. Trump supporters see him as a way out of their plight inflicted upon by them status quo because they see him as an outsider to the system that’s hurting them. On a basic level, it’s true. Trump is a man with no political experience who has attained the highest political position in the United States. His experience is mostly in conning workers, dodging taxes and keeping as much attention on himself as possible. Calling him an outsider deceived millions of people into thinking they were voting for someone far less dangerous than Donald Trump. People voted for Trump because business as usual was crushing them; they understandably wanted a way out of the status quo and saw their chance in ‘outsider’ Trump. He’s an outsider on another level: despite his multiple business failures and need for the government to bail him out, he’s a top member of the one percent. Much as he’s disavowed all affiliation with extraordinarily wealthy people like Charles and David Koch, Trump is a billionaire himself. Millions of working-class, blue-collar people came to believe that such a man as Trump cares about them, in large part through imprecise, sensationalized media coverage: ‘outsider’ is not a neutral word. It’s got a positive tone to it, like ‘underdog,’ the guy you want to root for simply because the odds are stacked against him. Calling Trump an outsider fails to accurately convey the dire peril electing him has put us all – but particularly the already vulnerable (low-income, people of color, women, people with disabilities, immigrants, non-Christians) in. A word like ‘outsider’ equates Trump with politicians like Bernie Sanders, who qualifies as an outsider, too. But it’s nonsensical to put these two men in the same category. Sanders did not have balm for every wound ailing America and he certainly had some major flaws. But his vision for healing what hurts did not explicitly promise to harm millions of people living in this country. Sanders is an outsider because his ideas run counter to the political and social culture he’s in (which does not necessarily make them wrong); the Democratic Party did not believe he would have enough support to get elected president because the people, the vast majority of whom desperately want and need systemic change, have become outsiders to their own government. Trump is an ‘outsider’ because he is the first bona fide schoolyard bully to be elected president on the platform of being a bully. A word other than ‘outsider’ is clearly needed. Ultimately, the problem is that electing someone ‘outside’ the system leads us to believe we’ve solved the system’s chronic and systemic issues. Trump may be an outsider in that he's assembling the wealthiest cabinet in history, but his initial appointments reveal he is no outsider when it comes to corruption - he's appointing an EPA chair who is against environmental protection, an education secretary who is anti-public education, a labor secretary that's against workers' rights, and a secretary of state that's literally spent his career deceiving and destroying our world. But even if they weren’t, choosing an outsider to the system to run the system has less of a chance of changing the system than it does of changing the outsider. There is real work in desperate need of being done, which would have been true regardless of the results on Nov. 8th. Trump’s election has underscored the need for this work to be done for some (at least now it’s harder to deny that racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia and general bigotry exist, so the claim goes) but obscured this need for many others. Getting an ‘outsider’ into the highest position in the land apparently seems to some of us like a big enough accomplishment to allow us to sit back and trust that wrongs will be righted without any further effort on the part of the people. Many laudable efforts are being made to challenge the election, Trump’s appointments and his nonchalant, better-than-this-attitude toward what should be a serious and solemn endeavour and many of them affirm that he is in fact not an outsider at all. But our mainstream media and the many who have been emboldened by his election to asssault others in his name (as just one example, the day after the election, a white man grabbed my ass and, as he was reaching around to the front, yelled, “if my president can grab pussy, so can I!” in the presence of four other white men who all turned the other way) (short piece I wrote) and bludgeon the vulnerable with demands for “unity” and “coming together” still believe that an ‘outsider’ won the election and that this fact alone legitimizes not only everything Trump says but everything said or done in his name. Trump is an outsider in a literal sense. But words matter. Continuing to tout him as one makes his rise to power seem like a victorious overcoming by a weak but deserving perseverer. In reality, what happened was not a ‘stunning upset’ nor even an ‘infiltration’ but an ominous coup not by an underdog but by a man already on top. This ‘outsider’ plans to use his newfound insider status to make more and more people outsiders – to healthcare, to the job market, to social services. Trump’s story is not about the underdog who has overcome the powerful; it is about the powerful who have overcome the underdogs...if we let him. In addition to blogging at http://mnicolerwildhood.com, m.nicole.r.wildhood's work has appeared in The Atlantic, The Atticus Review, and elsewhere. She was a finalist for America Magazine’s annual Foley Poetry Contest and her nonfiction has been anthologized in several collections. She currently writes for Seattle’s street newspaper Real Change and is at work on a novel and several volumes of poetry, including one in Spanish. Today in America: a portrait of reality now In the past I would have hid, put my hood up and turned towards the window, frustrations and resentments simmering, held in my own body. Not so now. My thoughts spilled over now, emboldened in Portland, in this strange election year. The man stares at me directly, small eyes ablaze with lascivious intentions. I turn back, startled by my own action- Will you stop looking at me please? You’re making me feel uncomfortable. Oh, you feel uncomfortable, do you? I do, I say and turn away again. Thanks. A black man behind me laughs. Where you from? he calls out to the man, Where you people from? The man spits. We been here longer than you uh, longer than both of you. What, so you Native? Unless you Native Indian Unless you Native Indian man, you not from here... they was here before all of us man. I fade in and out of listening to the exchange, unsure of my place in this conversation. A smiling white man gets on the train. A new fervor erupts, subtly. I turn around, fed up with my sickness, this pestilence of silence, thinking the black man behind me thought I was concerned because this glaring man was of a darker skin. It’s not about race, I say. No, I gotcha girl, this man come in here and he gives you looks, I get it.. make you feel uneasy... At the same time, the other man sneers angrily, gets up from his seat and paces back and forth, arguing with the smiling white man Hey man, the white man puts up his hands, I’m just looking to see if y’all registered to vote? Don’t vote for Hillary, that fucking bitch, snarls the angry man Well the real question, says the white man, is who do you want on the supreme court? Because, did you know that there were justices appointed who believed the bill to grant women the vote was a mistake? Well it was, in a way, mutters the snarling man. Man, what the fuck you talkin about? the black man laughs, What, women don’t get to vote? This woman here don’t get to vote? What, they just sit there and get fucked? Yeah man, yeah, in a way... They, what, just breed your fuckin babies? The snarling man gets up again and resumes his pacing back and forth. He fumes and boils, cursing the white man, a skinny guy, fuck you motherfucker, limey fucking nigger bastard, you don’t know me get off this fucking train fucking limey nigger get the fuck outta here he rants and rails in a rapid stream of shocking fervor. The white man gets off the train at a park, shaking his head in disbelief and fear at the man still spitting curses at him through the window. What the fuck just happened? I ask. I laugh nervously. Bemused. Confounded. Sensing the presence of danger. I’m just trying to get to work, pipes up a fat white man nestled in the back corner, wearing a construction vest, eating a something out of a brown paper bag. I’m just trying to get to the dispensary, says the black man with a shrug. The three of us laugh and share a feeling, teaming up in congratulatory good humor against the fuming man. He returns, flecks of spit foaming from his mouth. He seethes. Don’t even start this shit with me you motherfucker i’ll fuckin end you i’ll fuck you up i’ll fuckin end you- The black man laughs, arms sprawled across the back row like a regal panther. Man, what language was that? Is that what they speak on the fuckin loudspeaker? Bla bla bla, bitch don’t even bring that to my table. You want me to get jazzed? I’m bout to get down on your ass. I’ll fuck you right up in your asshole. With pleasure. Don’t call me bitch, fuckin crip. Man why you keep callin me crip huh? I ain’t no gangbanger. Fuck you crip I’ll fuckin knife you and you bitch, he looks straight at me, I’m coming for you I look him square in the face. Don’t talk to me like that, I say. I’ll fuck you with pleasure, says the black man. I fuck boys. Do you? I ask, turning to face him behind me. Nah, I like coochy. Me too, I say, but I don’t think he hears. Ey, why you still on this train motherfucker? yells the black man to the man pacing. He turns back to me- I fingerfucked em before, when I was in prison. No problem. Ain’t nothin to it. Motherfucker, he yells to the pacing man again, I said get off this train! The man paces to the end of the train car, shoulders hunched, muttering to himself, eyes wide, mustache bristling, cursing rapidly under his breath. Man I’ll give you somethin to talk about, says the black man. He winks at me and both men get off the train. Dude dude dude, calls the black man to the white security officers on the train platform, this man has a bomb. Dude, I’m serious. I’m serious. Yes, he was threatening. Yes, yes I’m serious. The train doors close and the black man tries to hold the door but is too late. He bangs on the closed doors as they start to depart and smiles at me through the window, tipping his hat as the train pulls away. I laugh nervously and a Latina woman smiles at me and shakes her head as if to say what nonsense, but also why you starting such a fuss? Because I did, somehow, start it. I feel like I’ve entered an absurdist theater, and the play is called “Today in America”. Hatred and racism simmering, sputtering, spew, boiling over in bursts, women fearing dark skinned men fearing gay men and darker skinned men fearing each other. Everyone wary, eyes ablaze, pacing, calling out to each other. Energy swirling in torrents of chaos: swirling from one body of fear to another, spreading suspicion, alerting one girl on a train- me- to a widespread network of problematic bombast. The shadows raise their head and look at a girl on a train with lascivious intentions. The girl, unwittingly, catalyzes a microcosmic reflection of fear and loathing. Performs a simple act of defiance. Of empowerment, she thinks. Tearing a hole in the skein of sweet capitalist illusion: everything is fine! We are all inclusive! Land of the free, home of the melting pot! Deception and fear look the girl in the eyes. The girl takes her hood down and pays attention for once. The girl looks back. Bio: Sara True is a visual and performance artist, poet, and world traveler. She hails from Los Angeles, CA, where she grew up with white privilege, a fear of her own sexuality, and proximity to the sea. She is a big fan of critical reevaluation of self and society, of values we hold to be inherent and true, and of redefinitions of beauty. She currently resides in snowy Portland, where her work focuses largely on examinations of the body, unraveling the effects of the body politic on the intimate, sensuous body. Her work can be found online at saratrueart.com or on Instagram as: @saratrueart. Far Beyond the Predetermined Shackles If none of the mindless crowds that populate gas stations and shopping malls want anything to do with you then you're probably doing something Right. Bio: Heath Brougher attended Temple University. He is the poetry editor of Five 2 One Magazine. He has published two chapbooks, “A Curmudgeon Is Born” (Yellow Chair Press 2016) and “Digging for Fire” (Stay Weird and Keep Writing Publishing Co. 2016) with another titled “Your Noisy Eyes” due out in 2017. He is a Best of the Net Nominee and his work has been translated into Albanian. He was the judge of Into the Void Magazine’s 2016 Poetry Competition and edited the anthology “Luminous Echoes,” the sales of which will be donated to help with suicide prevention. His work has appeared or is due to be published in Of/with, Chiron Review, SLAB, Main Street Rag, Blue Mountain Review, Novelmasters, Cruel Garters, MiPOesias, Third Wednesday, Gloom Cupboard, X-Peri, Gold Dust, and elsewhere. When not writing he helps with the charity Paws Soup Kitchen which gives out free dog/cat food to low income families with pets. 1/19/2017 0 Comments Three Poems by Andrea RandallPowerless, table for one Powerless, Table for one Thrashing, gnashing-- This isn’t how It’s supposed to be done Line up Check the box Get your sticker -- post a picture! Drive home To what? He won, they say But three million disagree Give him a chance, they say But do they even see? Women, the disabled, the poor The gay “issue” that hasn’t been settled -- won’t be settled-- Until he and his band of monkeys are out the door White and middle-class, here I sit Completely, utterly powerless over it Or, is that the easy way? What they want me to believe? So I pack up my signs, take down my posts, and quietly leave? Maybe so, maybe it’s true I’ve got a life to live; Three kids, plus two A job and a home and a marriage I love But wait -- no -- It’s not about me It’s about those who have no place to go When clinics close and housing’s denied; When we all own guns and there’s no place to hide I’ll still have my skin color and still be a woman, but I can’t turn a blind eye to my fellow human Keep your gun-slinging Jesus Keep your sneers at the lowly Keep your money Keep your guns Keep Kellyanne Conway I’ll keep my pride, and my dignity, too Because I’ve got weapons of words, Mr. Trump, and a pen and a notebook, too For now. Disconnected Millionaires Nasty Pussy Murderer Emails Bad Hombres Benghazi Gold Toilets Affairs Reality TV Setting rapists free Half are accusations Half are our future History Repeats Itself Propaganda Indoctrination -Interment -Work -Concentration History repeats History repeats History repeats Itself Blind eyes see a future of their imagination The future becomes legacy, in one generation Starving children of working parents History repeats History repeats History repeats Itself Pregnant teenagers with no choice The clinics all closed The pills all flushed Back alley Food lines Get a job you worthless slob History repeats History repeats History repeats Itself Rise to power to Suffocate freedom Freedom isn’t free It can be yours-- Just four easy payments It’s made in the USA So it’s okay Teeming shores with the world’s poor; Ms. Liberty with a blindfold But it’s okay-- It’s made of gold Russia -Germany Starvation -Concentration Walls -and Registries History Repeats History Repeats History Repeats Itself Bio: Andrea Randall has been writing poetry and short stories since she learned to write. Her poetry has been published in local presses, and she debuted her first novel, Ten Days of Perfect, in 2012. Andrea has gone on to publish more than a dozen novels and novellas, and lives and works with her novelist husband, Charles Sheehan-Miles. You can learn more about Andrea’s work and her life at www.andrearandall.com. Broken Bruised Enslaved Exhausted Ready Unmoved "Self-Portrait" aims to capture the essence of women living in a patriarchal society. The titles are: Broken, Bruised, Enslaved, Exhausted, Ready, Unmoved. These are stages of the life of a woman who wants to break out but cannot. The model for this series is Samriddhi Bharagava. Bio: Suhasini Patni is a second year undergraduate at Ashoka University, in India, studying English literature. She has previously published a book review in The Tishman Review and a micro-fiction piece with A Quiet Courage and Entropy2, and hopes to publish many more. She is new to the publishing world but loves to write. 1/18/2017 1 Comment Five Poems by Sergio A. OrtizNo Time to Lose It's cold here. Its color, a ninja turtle orange, and only 5 days left for el Presidente Electo to inaugurate his burned hair, his head de mal parío, his enano politician tweets. People say it's worth the trip to this Swearing In, that this kind of shit makes you grow. The thing is my body cannot stand another Jetblue seat, another Greyhound cafe. Besides, winter hurts. Its whiteness rusts the snow. Its racism confuses me, makes me feel small, like a very distant echo. Fuck it, if I go back to D.C. it'll be because I want to visit the Smithsonian's African American Collection. Where merchant ships loaded with slaves are still shipwrecked in my memory. Underground Tavern, When Darkness Falls He got there with a nugget for a tear and a face full of pity, the transvestite asking me for heat and then he wanted to bang me in the fanny. The girls dance alone, like their mothers. The boys look at them sitting in their lofts. They imagine the girls kissing and when they get excited they begin to kiss each other, rub their beard and lingual barbells to the rhythm of techno pop. Some are journalist. Some are strictly DIFFERENT but EQUAL. At five in the morning they kiss and touch then high speed out of there and … craaaassssh. Night ends in tragedy. And what do they do? They return whenever needed. They wait and hope morning doesn't arrive. They return to the corner where the travesties do their rounds for money and pleasure. They throw in the towel for the speed of a gesture. For the volatile in their emotions. A few brushes against each other are enough to tighten their waist and make them feel the pain of hard-hitting dolls. The solitary beat of the rhythm will make them rape the rapport between their eyes. They don't play slow music. You see, they're not playing the blues anymore. Hell, is where things buzz to the rhythm of a Cuban Son. They have not had time to decide if they want to hump them in the rump. Will they want to finish the dance, will they want to embrace fat bodies, ― don't mean to offend ― walk in the park, and throw pigeons crumbs? Up to how late do birds sing when they hear blood flowing? Between the Two of Us There will always be departure between us, you, the mirage, a feral dog hunting for water in the desert. I, the patriarch of a horde of slaves in search of a million masculinities. There will always be melody between us, you, the laughter of a child after placing his own foot in his mouth, I, all the noise that can fit into forty years of private reflection. There will always be names between us, I, the surgeon’s lamp in a psych ward, you, the first entry in a diary. Witching the World Real loneliness is like a window from wherein you cannot hear a thing. My loneliness is the tracks at a train crossing, a damnation of gunfire and impact. In silence my name: the instant at which the gods finally forget to call. I keep thinking, sing to yourself and survive. Expand to infinity like a deaf man expands his voice in a dream. On Becoming Eloquent I had to inherit a lighter shade of café au lait from my father’s side be designated the boy Mom had to assure my teeth fell before they grew crooked confirm I passed my courses at the university so I wouldn’t have to become a farmer I had to reject Mom’s dream of me becoming a lawyer and major in English with a minor in Cinematography Dad has to not faint when he sees me at Trump’s inauguration wearing bright Red White and Blue stilettos Bio: Sergio A. Ortiz is a gay Puerto Rican poet and the founding editor of Undertow Tanka Review. He is a two-time Pushcart nominee, a four time Best of the Web nominee, and a 2016 Best of the Net nominee. He is currently working on his first full length collection of poems, Elephant Graveyard. Losing Michelle to Melania Hillary losing to Trump was a devastating blow to most women, and in particular, to women raising daughters. As I kissed my daughter good night on Nov. 7, we talked about our excitement for waking up to the first female president. Like many women, we were both crushed when it didn’t happen. But there’s another layer to this. As I try to process the upcoming transition from Obama to Trump, I also keep coming back to this fact: We are going to lose Michelle to Melania. That image makes me cringe when I think about what a first lady will look like for my almost teen daughter over the next four years. Whether we like it or not, the media still focuses plenty of time and attention on the first ladies, usually for all the wrong reasons: what they’re wearing; their haircuts; their state dinner hosting skills. But I think Michelle changed all that and helped evolve the conversation around first ladies. She didn’t just stand by her man, but rather, stood next to her man and sometimes, even in front of her man—and that was good for our daughters to see. I grew up in the late ‘70s/early ‘80s in Ohio—yes, the same Ohio that just helped vote Trump in—where there wasn’t much encouragement for female achievement. Most of our goals centered on looking pretty and snagging a good husband. As a mother, it has been my mission to raise a daughter who wraps her self esteem in what she can do, not how she can look. So Michelle versus Melania and the type of women they represent touches close to home for me. Let’s start with some of Michelle’s achievements as first lady. Her “Let’s Move” initiative came at just the right moment. At a time when life expectancy is shrinking while children’s waistlines are growing, Michelle instituted a program that focused on exercise and nutrition for our younger generations. The program brings together parents, schools, medical professionals and others in a targeted, comprehensive effort to reverse the trend of childhood obesity in our country. Michelle not only talks the talk of Let’s Move, but she walks the walk. She started a community, organic garden on the White House grounds, often tended by local children. Food served in the White House comes largely from this garden. Let’s Move also involves an exercise component, which Michelle has helped role out to over 11 million students in schools throughout the nation. Other projects she has spearheaded: Joining Forces, which gives Americans tools to support military families; Reach Higher, which encourages students to aim for education beyond the high school level; and Let Girls Learn, which helps girls around the globe go to and stay in school. Then there are her speeches. Can anyone top Michelle Obama’s oratory skills? I’d argue no. Her address at the Democratic Convention brought together not just a splintered political party, but an entire nation, even if only for one night. Using herself as an example, she reminded a country of how far it had come. “That is the story of this country,” she said. Michelle Obama’s speeches have been so good, in fact, that Melania Trump famously plagiarized one of them during the Republican convention in July. I suppose this is where I start to get uncomfortable with Melania being the face of a first lady in my daughter’s world. Because if she can’t even come up with her own thoughts and words to share with the nation, what can she offer? Melania, has done what? Posed nude? Worn pretty dresses? Melania, so far, has established herself as a traditional, behind-the-scenes wife, one who’s social media presence focuses on fashion and scenes from New York City. In a recent interview, she listed “reading magazines and loving fashion” as her hobbies. She has remained very much in the background of her husband’s very large spotlight and when she makes the rare venturing out, it’s not to the praise that has followed Michelle. In fact, quite the opposite. I worry Melania is going to set back all that Michelle has moved forward. The image of a smart, strong accomplished woman is going on the line. I’m not trying to pick on Melania before she has even stepped foot in the White House. Ok, maybe I am. Let’s face it: she has very, very big shoes to fill. As a mother to a daughter in her most formative of years, I am concerned that it is a job too far outside of her wheelhouse. For my daughter’s sake, however, I will put on a face of optimism and hope. Because right now, what else have we got? Bio: Amanda Loudin is a freelance writer who covers health, fitness, parenting and travel. Her work has appeared in the Washington Post, Outside magazine, Scary Mommy and many others. You can find her on Twitter at @misszippy1. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
April 2024
Categories |