Moving forward with poetry and prose

in a clock, pushing our own weight

against another's in the hopes of turning

things around. Pound the pavement

if your privilege is a body that can

(but god how knowing the taste

of pavement can keep you from it).

March on bended knee or with bowed

head, march with wallet open or from

your own small bed. Put your hound dog

howl to the phones, put your queer

shoulder to the wheel -- re-sound

your own resistance & make it run

aground on the front lawn of any House

that won't help you get free. March

like your sisters are dying. March like

your planet is through. March like your own

life depends on it & march knowing

that marching can't save you. March

so they know we'll still get up

& march tomorrow morning, too.

Meg Day is the 2015-2016 recipient of the Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship, a 2013 recipient of an NEA Fellowship in Poetry, and the author of Last Psalm at Sea Level (Barrow Street 2014). Day teaches at Franklin & Marshall College and lives in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

The Work

Ada Limón

Every day, the body armor's slick skin

shadows over the parts we hide, knife

blade in the bones, sharp enough to cut

through the web of words we dodge

or dare to shed and shake off like water.

Sister, I see you. Tongue like a fist, seeds

in some impossible dirt, a river in a city,

a moving border, and a tree sometimes, too,

surviving by not moving, just taking

the weather as it comes, deluge after deluge,

a clearing in the atmosphere, whatever's next,

you'll step to it. There's a work we do:

scrubbing clean the mind of outrage

so we can boost each other through

another hoop, say, It's okay. And we even

lie a little, say, It can't get much worse, or

Nothing can stop you. But we know every

day something tries to slit our thick armor

off stealthily so it almost seems like tenderness

or care, something for our own good. Still,

we keep the tough husks, we soldier on, we move

into the world. And you know what I love?

We do this moving for each other,

for the future woman who wants to unzip

that suffocating uniform she's forced into

by self-preservation, for the mothers

that raised us not just to speak, but

to speak up, for the women who lift us

when our bodies fail, for the men who lift us

when our bodies fail, to exalt this body

alive, unsinkable, unfettered, who has been

marching all of her life.

Ada Limón is the author of four books of poetry, including "Bright Dead Things," which was named a finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and a finalist for the 2017 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award.

Let the World Learn to Love Each Shape

Mahogany L. Browne

There is no one way to be a woman

Today, I create a poem for our children & their soft forgiving bodies

I want to be remembered as someone that moved with spirit

I want to be someone that moved because of the blood of a people

I want my legacy to create a shallow grave

there, our footsteps will haunt our enemies

Let me lie beneath the tree of a good god until

until the sun runs light into a flood of basin water

Dim the light darlings

I want to construct a web of shadows

& swing my name in the highest corner until it chimes

My life was never a weapon

My tongue was never a nuisance

My body was never a failure

I love myself enough to chant this prayer

until we can all exist together

Let the world learn to love each shape & hum & strand from our tongues

This breath of song will honor our mothers

This textured story will honor our grandmothers

& what is more beautiful?

The artist or the art;

 the mother or her child;

the killer or their bullets?

All of it is a glimmer fold of freedom

All of this beauty is a song I've been discouraged to sing

Sing with me darlings,

Let us torch the same cages that restrict us

Let us shred each bond against the sharp bridges with our teeth

Let us gather their ashes to smear across our cheeks

Let us echo into the hollow of our hands a thunderous life

Watch it reach the sky, this yellowing wingless prayer, cockcrow reborn electric

Together we call the rain to wash away the hurt, the howl & the dust, each weeping praise;

a reclamation of what has always been rightfully ours.

Mahogany L. Browne is a California-born, Brooklyn-based writer, poet and community organizer. She is the Poetry Program Director of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, Program Director of BLM@PRATT & Artistic Director of Urban Word NYC.

Resistance is Fertile

Allison Glock

Resist is too gentle a word.

A tug of an impulse.

Something one does a second serving of cake.

A dog at the end of a leash.

I am more interested in refusal.

In rejection.

In facts, which still exist and carry the weight of centuries.

I refuse to unsee what I have been shown.

To pretend something is not what it is.

This sounds small.

It isn't.

I recognize who benefits if we are confused

If we are unclear

If we are off-balance

If we are afraid

If we are split from the herd by our otherness.

Hint: not us. (Not anyone, really.)

I regard the mirror.

Promise to never stop seeing myself.

To remain visible.

This sounds indulgent.

It isn't.

I make a list of lies.

Refuse those words in my mouth.

I make a list of truths.

Sing them to the heavens.

Even as I am said to be, "overreacting."

(Women are always overreacting.)

I embrace my teenaged daughters.

Who bought Hillary stickers

And gave their Christmas money to Planned Parenthood

And marched at BLM protests.

Who don't want to have children any more.

My children don't want to have children any more.

I hold on.

When they are most frightened.

When they thrash and gnaw about bad times to come.

I hear every fear and correct none of them.

That, I resist.

Award-winning journalist Allison Glock is a senior writer for espnW whose writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Rolling Stone, Esquire, GQ and many others. She has written six books, including her latest, the third in her YA series "Changers," which has been widely lauded as an important series that teaches kids about empathy and tolerance.

When marching becomes a movement

Jessica Jacobs

"Women, if the soul of the nation is to be saved, I believe that you must become its soul."-- Coretta Scott King

After a week of trekking in the mountains of Nepal, our shoulders were piano wires and our knees rusty door hinges, but it was our feet that threatened failure. At lunch -- the one real moment of rest each day -- we took off our boots to examine the damage. Sarah's little toes were the biggest concern. Each curled in and hid beneath its neighbor, which then mashed down on it, leaving it red and blistered, more boiled shrimp than toe. Plundering our first aid kit, I hammocked a strip of gauze around each shy digit, pulled it into normal toe position, then secured the strip in a loop around her instep. It worked so well this became our custom: I knelt and ministered to her feet each morning -- an intimacy neither of us would have expected to share.

We weren't supposed to be friends. I was a Jewish lesbian living in Manhattan; Sarah, a straight Mormon from Salt Lake City. But after our work forced us together, that's what we became close enough to cash in our vacation days for a shared trip. And there we were, sun-up to sundown, climbing over ankle-twisting boulders, sweating through vast swaths of desert with the snow-capped peaks of the Annapurnas hovering above like hallucinations, and finally summiting a mountain pass in a white-out blizzard.

With each person we passed, we exchanged a ritual greeting: our hands pressed together, we said Namaste and bowed, a gesture that means both hello and I recognize the divine in you.

When I picture the Women's March on Washington, and the simultaneous women's marches around this country and the world, memories from this trek are what I draw on. But if fish together form a school, and starlings a murmuration, then what do you call a group of marchers? If you're against them, likely a mob; for them, perhaps a movement. A movement -- a beautiful collective noun that describes both what it is (a force for change) and what its constituents do to make that change happen.

On Jan. 21, thousands of women of different beliefs and backgrounds will march together in the direction of that change, asserting that "Women's Rights are Human Rights and Human Rights are Women's Rights." Among them, I imagine women beginning conversations with the strangers marching beside them, women who on the surface seem worlds away, and recognizing the divine soul in each, as well as the soul in herself, recognizing how, together, they might move forward toward a better version of themselves and this country.

And what is this act of shared walking if not an acknowledgement by one soul of another? On extended treks, long-story-shorts are pushed aside to make room for detail and nuance, for the questions buried beneath our modern hustle: do my practices match my beliefs? Is the person I am now the person I'd most like to be? Am I acting as a steward for the world I want to live in, for the world I want to leave behind?

As we walked, Sarah and I helped each other toward answers and adapted as we went. After noticing how often we stopped to access our supplies while we hiked, taking off our packs to grab sunblock or a snack, I began to stow such items in the outside pockets of Sarah's pack and she did the same in mine. In this way, carrying what the other needed, we made better progress.

Yes, we were people from very different backgrounds -- to pretend our differences simply fell away would be far too simple -- but we were also two friends grown close through collective endeavors. Even once we'd returned from Nepal, this shared carrying continued, encouraging each other as we each moved into new work that gives back more to both us and our communities.

This is what I'll think of on Jan. 21, as thousands of women join in the streets and raise up their voices. Together, they will march for change and, in turn, will be changed by marching, carrying that movement back home with them.

Jessica Jacobs is the author of the chapbook "In Whatever Light Left to Us," a memoir-in-poems of early marriage, and "Pelvis with Distance," a biography-in-poems of the artist Georgia O'Keeffe. An avid long-distance runner, she lives in Asheville, North Carolina, with her wife, the poet Nickole Brown.