THEY AREN'T JUST TAKING SELFIES

by Tricia Knoll

Florida student Emma Gonzalez to lawmakers and gun advocates: 'We call BS'. CLICK HERE to see her dramatic speech via CNN.

having sex before graduation,
or trying pot before sloe gin.

They volunteer, ride horseback
to halt pipelines, engage

with hip hop, rockers and rappers
to say words that need saying,

march in Washington and our city,
enlist, vote, call for police accountability,

and want citizenship for DACA immigrants.
Teenagers and twenty-somethings

see a world every day on their phones
where shooters slaughter friends

in school because there is no will
to ban assault weapons and control guns.

They know shots crack living room windows
on residential streets, that gangs fight useless

wars. When young people knew rightness
of the opportunity for gay marriage,

the nation swayed and so did judges.
They are screaming for gun control

and the right to sit in school
and learn without fear

with no more brush-off praying
for teachers and families

until something is done.
Yell with them.

We need them
to know we’re with them.

Tricia Knoll is an Oregon poet who has signed petitions for gun control for more than forty years. "We are children" say the survivors in Parkland. Do we need to hear more? She doesn't. She is tired of the empty rhetoric of pray for the families and do nothing to stop gun lobby money in Washington. Her book How I Learned to Be White is coming out from Antrim House in 2018.

MEN WITH NO LIPS

by Tricia Knoll

I’ve learned to be afraid of them.
Someone is going to tell a lie.
Go after the drug peddlers, ignore
drug companies pumping opiods.
Refurbish Hotel Guantanamo
with used mattresses from high-rise hotels.
Breathe deep of clean, clean coal.
Pretend the sick get health care
or that your dreams are equal
to those of people without a country.
I'm never afraid to kneel
and know its rightness.

White guys who smile by folding
their lips in, straight lines across the face
to hide  the aging of the down curves
but not to show teeth. Some public relations
gimmick to refrain from being read as wolf,
predator, out to get you. Smuggy. Smirky.
Someone is telling a lie.  I’ve known frogs
I trusted more.


Tricia Knoll is an Oregon poet who once heard of an art installation by Robbie Conal called "Men With No Lips." So here we are in the news of the State of the Union. Men without lips.

"Men With No Lips" by Robbie Conal

"Can't Even" by Robbie Conal

OREGON: LOCAL NEWS

by Tricia Knoll

Waves of bluster rain roll down the blacktop hill.
People at the coast fled a tsunami but here
it’s rain and chances for more rain: 100%,

as if the sky knows that Ursula Le Guin
is gone and we’ll be left with her worlds
apart, a few cats, and first-edition books

we bought because they took us away,
saved not to start a pricey collection;
some things we never let go.

We took medical care into our own hands
and voted big-time to tax hospitals and insurers
to keep Medicare for people who need the most,

have the least, and from whom much was taken.
In the women’s locker room, talk took today to
old ladies’ pot parties with lessons

on what works best, the reason being
that if the old Oregon ladies are willing to stand up
to the feds, by god, someone better listen.

Ursula was one of us.

Tricia Knoll has been an Oregonian since 1971 though real Oregonians make a distinction on whether you were born here or not. Sometimes it's a wild ride living on the left coast. The forests burn in the summer. The land slides in the winter. Earthquake faults are just a few miles away. Our Senators are Democrats, and the wine just keeps getting better.

LINEAGE

by Tricia Knoll

Iraqis in the area where a double suicide bombing killed more than 20 people in central Baghdad on January 15, 2018, the second such attack in the Iraqi capital in three days. —Sabah Arar/AFP/Getty Images via The Washington Post, January 15, 2018

Eighteen women in black
at Friday lunch hour.
A silent witness circle,
like spokes at the edges
of a gristing wheel,
a protest of the 2003 bombing
of Baghdad.

My black umbrella shed
March’s bluster rains.
Chill fists plunged into pockets
of a black trench coat.
Black tights wrapped my legs
against sideways winds
buffeting the women’s side
of Portland’s Lownsdale Square.

When asked, we handed out
slips of paper.
Do not let this war
go on and on and on.

             *

Antigone wore night’s
cloak to bury her brother.
Israeli women in black
called out their army’s evil.
Black evening gowns
sweep the red carpet,
black power-suits
throw open the doors
of Congress.
The women speak.

We hear because
we already knew.
This must not
go on and on and on.

Never retire
your witness clothes.
Need never vanishes.

Tricia Knoll is an Oregon poet who participated in many Women in Black silent witnesses in Portland in 2013. Her book How I Learned to Be White is coming out from Antrim House in 2018.

BUFFING UP MY RESISTANCE RING

by Tricia Knoll


The young boy on the deck
of a cave fingers his ring.
Seeking to join the flock

that scoots through space,
the resistance that old women
like me have known as marches,

petitions, sit-ins, showings up,
letter writing, paying forward,
and which he may learn as war

to tilt love forward, to feed
the hungry, house them,
welcome them from the far

corners of the universe.
This forever war, I want to say
to him standing in hope,

the forever work of keeping
shine in our hands. Guard
the glow for work.


Tricia Knoll’s collection Broadfork Farm, now available from The Poetry Box, contains poetry about pigs, dogs, starry nights, predators and farmers on this small organic farm in Trout Lake, Washington. Knoll is a regular farmsitter on the property.

THE FOGGIEST IDEA

by Tricia Knoll

Caribou Silhouette by Peter Mather. Caribou bull 

silhouetted in fog along the coastal plain of

Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge,

the calving grounds for the 170,000 strong herd.

A provision in the #GOPTaxScamBill allows

a section of the ANWR to be opened to

oil exploration.

A two-page summary,
all that some of them knew.
Enough to know Corker
got his money. Forget
the bullets that sneak in
special funds for Senator
Toomey. How the landed
white gentry pass through,
pass upwards wealth.
Claim simplicity. A tax bill
opens up drilling in the Arctic
Refuge for one more vote
to sully and abuse
the wild space the first people
sing to, songs of we are
the caribou people. Focus
your cameras carefully
if you want to catch winks,
or that the fog drips chill
into hearts of the many
who say no. Our national
mirror clouds over
in the face of privilege.
We see dimly.
The fog settles, not just
into the mist of war, a shawl
of sadness over us, the, kin
to the tired, the poor, yes kin
even to the caribou people.  

Tricia Knoll is an Oregon poet well accustomed to fog and rain. What she cannot excuse is the claims of Senators voting for the tax bill that they did not know or care how much each stood to gain from passage of the bill. 

HOLDING A CUP

by Tricia Knoll

I never had to hold up a cup
to get what leaks my way.

My mother’s French porcelain
remaining tea cup, the delicate handle?

That pewter beer mug
I got at a white elephant party?

Yes, I’m strong enough
to keep my arm up for a time

that old, teacher, call on me,
I have something to say,

while darkening winter
waters soak my toes

to numb. The arms
of an old woman

who only knows
that trickle down

means something cold,
frozen. Like needled icicles.

Tricia Knoll is an Oregon poet who usually itemizes her tax returns. She has lived long enough to read the debunking on trickle down theories of tax cuts. Her next book How I Learned to Be White comes out from Antrim House is early 2018.

A FLOCK OF WILD TURKEYS

by Tricia Knoll

You’d pull off the road for that,

wouldn’t you? Beside Pigeon River?

A flight of forty landing.

Thin and sleek, running.

Watch their heads bob

and thin legs pedal.

You’d forget news

of feathered nests

and overstuffed breasts.

Tweeted by Bill Kristol.

Tricia Knoll is an Oregon poet who has only seen one wild turkey in Oregon but many, many more in Vermont.