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    The New Verse News presents politically progressive poetry on current events and topical issues.

    Friday, January 20, 2017

    SOME WORDS FOR MEANWHILE

    by Lucia Galloway


    Poster by Jennifer Maravillas for the Women's March on Washington


    There is only this way,
    this one way,
    to breathe   while
    rain falls­—
    finally falls & falls­—
    in Southern California.
    Comes in repeated fits,
    storms over parched lands
    & lawns.  Pools at our doorsteps
    from overflowing gutters, sheets
    off the pavements of parking lots,
    carves new rivulets
    in our gardens, our
    paths and trails.

    One way    while
    crews erect viewing stands
    in DC­-mile after mile
    of bleachers, media towers­-
    along the storied route.
    While in airports, passengers
    clutch boarding passes, eye
    podium monitors.
    While on basement floors
    & kitchen tables, women paint
    slogans: Resistance is Joy.
    Pack boots, mufflers
    & down jackets.
    D.C., Chicago, Tucson, Denver, L.A.
    . . . (will the buses make it?)     while
    the women hope that nothing happens,
    knowing that nothing
    can mean anything now.


    Lucia Galloway’s chapbook The Garlic Peelers won the Quill’s Edge Press 2014 inaugural chapbook competition.  She is also author of Venus and Other Losses (2010) and a chapbook, Playing Outside (2005), and has published work in Tar River Poetry, Comstock Review, Midwest Quarterly, and Wide Awake: Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond, among other publications.  Her poems have received awards from the Bread Loaf School of English, Artists Embassy International, Rhyme Zone, and the MacGuffin National Poet Hunt.  She lives in Southern California, where she curates a reading series in her home town of Claremont.  

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