Hold the fort

For we are coming…

I.W.W. Battle Song

Mallet men of manifest destiny keep time; women waulking tweed keep time;

rhythmic stomps, knocks of cloth on plank; a song; if we still raised our voices

like progeny; like singing lineage; the fluid life of memory; inheritance; in time;

with time; in step;  

side by side

we battle onward

victory will come

who are my people; sing in Gaelic; seafarers and women waiting with child;

sing in Bantu; sing in Mandarin; of sugar beets and rail ties; sing in Arabic;

sing in Mixtec; sing in Polish; old world dirges cut to notes; where is the hymn,

cry, wail; listen; the souls of Everett Massacre still march the dock to shore up

the strike; still moor the barge, shot in the chest, singing;

look my comrade

see the Union

banner waving high

cadence of march-step is not chorus—…

BY DEBORAH MUTNICK

Day 3 of the LIU lockout. Labor Day. I have been locked out of Long Island University’s Brooklyn campus by an administration that makes my colleagues and me feel like poster children for the neoliberal corporatization of higher education. We have lost our health care and other benefits, our pay, and our access to email and course management websites. On this Labor Day, we are unemployed.

The lockout is unprecedented in higher education. It is a union-busting tactic intended to bully the faculty into submission. Whether spearheaded by the board of trustees or the president, the lockout suggests, as one observer aptly put it, that we have “a bad actor at the helm.” True as this description is—affirming our experience at LIU over the past three years in particular—it would be a mistake to conclude that the lockout is simply the result of bad leadership.

Rather, we…

Fox Frazier-Foley, founding editor-in-chief of Agape Editions, chats with Mariahadessa Ekere Tallie about her poetry collection Strut (Agape Editions, 2018), the process of choosing the right press, and how her collection found its home with Agape.

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Fox Frazier-Foley: Hi! Ready to talk a little bit about Strut? 

Mariahadessa Ekere Tallie: Hi! I’m ready. This heat is doing all kinds of things to us here in New York! Oh my goodness.

FFF: Oh, I thought of you yesterday—you’ve been telling me how hot it is there, and yesterday I saw an article about how the roaches are gonna start flying in NYC because of the heat. Like palmetto bugs!!!

[Both laughing]

MET: I sooooooo gotta get outta here.

FFF: I’m sorry it’s so crazy hot there! It’s hot here, too, but you kinda get used to it. And at least nothing is on fire near me right now…