writing from
Scars Publications

Audio/Video chapbooks cc&d magazine Down in the Dirt magazine books

 

This writing was accepted for publication in the
108 page perfect-bound ISSN#/ISBN# issue/book

Respect Our Existence
or Expect Our Resistance

cc&d, v272
(the June 2017 issue - the 24 year anniversary issue)

You can also order this 6"x9" issue as a paperback book:
order ISBN# book


Respect Our Existence or Expect Our Resistance

Order this writing
in the issue book
Nothing
Lasts

the cc&d
May-August 2017
collection book
Nothing Lasts cc&d collectoin book get the 4 page
May-August 2017
cc&d magazine
issue collection
6" x 9" ISBN#
paperback book:

order ISBN# book

Order this writing in the book
the 2018 literary
review date book

(the 2017 poetry, flash fiction and
artwork weekly paperback book)
tthe 2018 literary review date book get the 146 page poem,
flash fiction & art
weekly planner
as a 6" x 9" ISBN#
paperback book:

order ISBN# book

an editor’s cut

Brady Peterson

your hair wet,
your teeth white,
we swam that summer before
the speech, before the signs came down—
four boys enter the water and swim
to a deck anchored thirty yards offshore,
the lake emptied, and you led me up the hill
to where a crowd had gathered around a family,
gathered like brooding thunderheads—something about
the way young men stand, rounded slumped shoulders,
their fisted hands dangling like clubs, as if they ruled
a section of the world too small and insignificant to matter,
yet prepared to act—mostly in the cover of night.

we took a stand there, or you did. I merely went along,
but knowing it was a good move, the right choice—
this going along with what should have made sense
to anyone capable of thought, what we ought
to be and believe. I was fifteen and you were nineteen,
or I was sixteen and you were twenty, raised
on scripture and prayer, though beginning
to see the rift in the fabric, that Jesus didn’t really
mean any of it be applied to them, those kept apart—
the stain.

church was never the same to me after that afternoon
when the crowd wanted to kill us, really wanted us dead—
simply because I dared to swim out to the deck and join
four boys. they have every right, you said. my mother
pleaded, saying I didn’t know any better, didn’t mean—
anything by it. that I had lived on an island as a child
and didn’t understand the ways and days of men.

my mother pleaded.



Scars Publications


Copyright of written pieces remain with the author, who has allowed it to be shown through Scars Publications and Design.Web site © Scars Publications and Design. All rights reserved. No material may be reprinted without express permission from the author.




Problems with this page? Then deal with it...