You Are Politics

It is September 23, 2016, and you’re reading this because our classmates, faculty, campus, community, state, and nation didn’t listen last time

On the streets of the two cities is found / a pattern or practice of conduct that violates / the Constitution or federal law

Politics is like an awful off-Broadway play that can’t decide whether it’s a tragedy or a comedy.

Omar annoyed me for the normal reasons that students annoy teachers.

The night of the second presidential debate, I called my mother. It wasn’t supposed to be a political call;

I was born like anyone else. Mom and Dad loved me like anyone else’s parents loved them. Like anyone else, after school, ran from skinheads.

Day 1: I woke and opened my eyes to a quiet morning, trying to feel if it was the end of an era.

The morning after the election, I agonized about how to talk with my first-year students about the outcome.

The first time I heard about the recording of President-elect Donald Trump bragging about his demeaning treatment of women like it was a badge of honor, I no longer wanted my boyfriend of five years to touch me.

I heard in a Black boy town / there was a pool filled / with red / and the white people

…there is no literary character more similar to the President-elect than Napoleon Bonaparte as depicted by Tolstoy in War and Peace.

Artist, designer, and teacher Katie Reigner tackles our fourth issue with two pieces of musical poetry accompanied by a watercolor illustration.

In the fall of 2012, I moved to Kabul, Afghanistan.

This series of hybrid gag panels and short prose is modeled after mid-century children’s comics like Casper, Little Dot, Little Eva, and Little Lulu, but stars “Kayla,” a self-portrait character whose blank eyes and somewhat sad, harried expression never changes.