Apocalypse Night
by Barbara Lightner

They would
     crack thunder,
erupt with the fierceness of volcanoes,
          become power
     in a righteousness of apocalypse.

What we got
     was small rain,
          the piss-conduit of frogs.

Listen! You can hear them now:
brekekekekex, koax, koax . . . .

* Greek playwright Aristophanes, known for his ridicule and savaging of contemporary society, used brekekekekex, koax, koax as the sound frogs made in his comedy of the same name.

Barbara Lightner is a 73-year old shameless agitator who began writing poetry in law school to escape the intolerable burden of death by law. She grew up in rural Tennessee among sharecroppers and cotton magnates and lived among killer whales and dolphins when on an island in Puget Sound. She taught Creative Writing at Skagit Valley College in Mount Vernon WA. She currently lives in Wisconsin where she owned and operated a 50-cow dairy farm; opened up and ran the Red Wheelbarrows Bookshop; and tried for political office where she failed miserably. The Madison WI Equal Opportunities Commission granted her its 20th Anniversary Award for Community Organizing in the Women’s Community. She has been known to write satire and parody.

Sonia Sanchez organizes grandmothers
to occupy army recruitment center

Defiant Trespass
by Barbara Lightner

Can’t sit down
     on the rocking chair porch
          of the is,
bad air disturbing your ease,
     old women,
          sending you into the center
where they hold the big cigar.

Cigar’s miasma
          fills the swamp
of a fetid finale,
     circular self satisfactions
rung ’round by the law
          they’ve done in.

Take your lesson:
          the cockatoo dies
               outside of her cage;
Prometheus high in the crags
               had his liver pecked out
                    for trying and trespass;
Eve didn’t make it ‘gainst
          the warlords of patriarch deeds.
And for you?
          No bird sings.

Defiant trespass,
     the charge
          brought in law;
     the charge
          waged for peace,
grandmothers resisting.

Barbara Lightner is a 73-year old shameless agitator who began writing poetry in law school to escape the intolerable burden of death by law. She grew up in rural Tennessee among sharecroppers and cotton magnates and lived among killer whales and dolphins when on an island in Puget Sound. She taught Creative Writing at Skagit Valley College in Mount Vernon WA. She currently lives in Wisconsin where she owned and operated a 50-cow dairy farm; opened up and ran the Red Wheelbarrows Bookshop; and tried for political office where she failed miserably. The Madison WI Equal Opportunities Commission granted her its 20th Anniversary Award for Community Organizing in the Women’s Community. She has been known to write satire and parody.

Revolutioning by Proxy
by Erik Tate

For those of us who aren’t quite ready to
pitch our tents in the park,

those of us who want to know more about what’s
going on out there before we commit,

for those of us with soft skulls,
     those of us who are partial to our spleens,

or
for those of us who want to step in gradually,
get our feet wet first,

we can safely watch events unfold from
in front of our computer screens.

The danger in this is
          after a time

we’ve convinced ourselves that we can see more by
staying home,
watching up close,

letting the revolution come to us.

Tuning in to live feeds of key encampments 24/7
we can chat with protesters on the front lines,

watch as cops pull the tarps from over
sleeping protesters in the rain —

seeing it all without leaving our living rooms!

We watch as protesters retake a park they were
driven from days earlier.

Such a feeling of pride,

like
when our team wins, we say

we won

even though we

had nothing to do with it.

Occupy the Heart
by James C. Henderson

When we look back on what we do here today
whatever the outcome, whatever the result
we can say we did it out of love
as friends, who, before we occupied
were preoccupied by doubt and despair.
Who, before we were many, were one
alone in our room looking out
at the future with dreary eyes.
Sure, now that we are together, out in the open
there is danger.
Now that we have shown our faces
vowed to love one another and the world
we are vulnerable to the cold
to pepper spray, the rain of billy clubs
but here we stand.
Without food or shelter, without signs
without even our books, we stand.
Inside or outside of the designated hours
or the prescribed zones of free speech
we stand, voices raised, for what’s right.
To the forces that oppose us,
to those that oppress us, we say:
You can kick us out of your public parks
your government centers, your open spaces.
These are not really what we occupy.
We occupy the heart.

James C. Henderson has published poetry in a variety of literary journals including Haute~Dish, Double Dare Press, 42opus, and Midwest Poetry and has participated in numerous poet/artist exhibitions at The Crossings at Carnegie in Zumbrota, Minnesota. A member of OccupySaintPaul, James lives with his wife, Athena, in New Brighton, Minnesota.

from this day forward
by Michael Mars

the fathers never meant by peacefully assembling,
that inalienable right to collectively complain,
to petition the government for a redress of grievances,.
stand against an entity uncontrollable, a future unacceptable,
they never meant for those kinds of things
to take place after the sun went down, well into the night
much less on the grass, such citizens are to be remanded
to the concrete walks, the hard outline of streets,
never the soft yielding leaves of grass
certainly not in places frequented by privilege
for that would be quite inconvenient to haves
which always make up a whole or at least
that sacrosanct one percent of the whole
what were you thinking, little ones,
stop reading books, or listening to others
your libraries will be hid away in dumpsters
maybe you should congregate on ships in harbors
except tea bags seem inconsequential like so many starbucks
in an unwashed sea of Citizens United, every corporation now
becomes a brother to you, maybe even a brother-in-law or two
brothers created by law, the newest by-laws clearly reveal
the first amendment has become annoying to the few,
amendment number one is the inconvenient truth
from this day forward we shall begin with two,
as in two nations under god, divisible

Michael Mars is a counter culture poet writing from beneath the urban sprawl in the not so quaint hamlet of Farmers Branch, Texas. Some of his current work is touring with Speak Peace: American Voices Respond to Vietnamese Children’s Paintings and can also be found in Soundzine, Foliate Oak, Gumball Poetry and Tattoo Highway. After spending over 60 years on the planet, he looks forward to waking up and to this day remains cautiously optimistic.

Dear readers and poets,

We would like to take this opportunity to let you know that we have reached a critical point in our publication schedule. The point is, while we have accepted many more poems (and continue to review submissions), we have published all of the poems for which we have received audio recordings. And without putting too fine a point on it, we’re reluctant to publish poems without the audio. Which brings us to an intersection. A cross roads. A turning point, if you will.

Rather than continue with a weekly publication schedule in a blog-like format, OccuPoetry is now working toward an issue-based publication. We aim to publish three issues in 2012, and we will continue to accept submissions via submishmash. Each issue will be downloadable in e-book formats and will contain the embedded audio recordings. We feel that editing issues, rather than weekly posts, will create a a more sustainable publication and one that is better fitted to the poems themselves. At this point, we plan to release each issue in epub, mobi, and pdf formats.

We are thankful for the contributions we have received so far, and please keep the wonderful submissions coming. Look for our first issue in April.

Yesterday marked the end of the second and beginning of the third month for OccuPoetry. We want to take this moment to reflect on all that has happened through the breakneck-paced publishing of the last sixty-some-odd days.

First, and most importantly, you helped us launch a brand new poetry journal. In that time, OccuPoetry published 29 poems by 25 poets, 1 video with poetic narration, and 1 photograph of a poem/et.

Poems lend themselves to being read more than once. So, we invite you to use this index of our poems — your poems — to revisit and spend a little more time with one or more of the poems you liked, missed, or just want to read and hear again.

Next, despite its nascence, OccuPoetry received mention by New Pages, About.com, and even the venerable Poetry Foundation. Take a look at what these good people have to say about this space.

And finally, let us know how we are doing. Leave a comment below or share our journal with your friends or circles or followers.

Immigration & Customs Enforcement
S1639 www.ice.gov
by Karen Douglass

Whose idea to chill our borders?
Metal badge — ICE Officer — not real
gold pinned to a dark unifrom.
I cannot explain ICE,
never had to run, duck and cover,
to harvest lettuce or grapes,
put on a nanny dress, hide
my face in false papers.
Border crossing is a curse;
dying of poverty is a curse.
Twelve foot fences
make fourteen foot ladders.
ICE — to kill.

Karen Douglass: Her books include Red Goddess Poems; Bones in the Chimney (fiction); Green Rider, Thinking Horse (non-fiction); Sostenuto, (poems) and The Great Hunger (poems), which is available from Plain View Press (2009). Individual poems have appeared in a wide variety of publications.

La Révolution Américaine
by David Osnoe

The crowded gallery brims
with warm energy-
small nervous exchanges
of smiles & handshakes,
the scene is reminiscent
of the Parisian underground.

Pops- an older, houseless man
wears his friendly grin
& greets his brothers & sisters
with love.

An elderly couple,
dressed warmly & holding hands
squeeze down the quickly filling
aisle. I stand alone

in the back of the room as
the white-haired woman’s eyes
wrapped in tissue-paper wrinkles
flash sky-blue in my direction & I nod

in deference. My nose fills
with the dense odors of pressed bodies
& cigarette smoke. I turn to face

the projection screen,
watching the conversations of strangers.

Hemp oil rising to my nose-
it has been rubbed into the dreadlocks
of the slight, pale skinned girl
who sits beside her husband-
both of them clad in skinny jeans
& vintage 1940’s accessories.

Lights
dim & the documentary begins:
All Night, All Day-
the story of the seven week old
Richmond Occupation.

I see this
film mirrored in the flashes
of NY police batons raised over
plastic riot shields, in the screams
of UC Davis students sprayed with chemicals
& the heavy intonation, the heartbeat
of hope struggling against violence-

I let history quietly whisper
into my reddened earlobes
& blink back refracting tears
against the flashing of the projected future:
here, nestled in Virginia’s bosom,
revolution stirs.

David Osnoe is a Richmond, VA based writer who will be graduating from VCU in 2012 with a BA in English. He joined the Richmond Occupation on November 1st, after his friend was arrested and the Kanawha Plaza encampment was destroyed. One of the successes of the Occupation is its inclusive acceptance of a variety of skills, talents and voices and that is partially what inspired La Revolution Americaine.