Heavy Expectations

Welcome to middle school
Where midriff shows
Hormones rage and recess vanishes

Textbooks weigh a ton when

They’re piled in the bags of 6th grade girls

Who are expected to behave 

while the world wages war against them 

for a body that keeps changing

Hermit crab kids wearing backpacks half their body size

Packed to the brim with the weight of words

Hunched over and running against time 

Because tardiness equals detention:

Be late a few minutes and trade hours of your life

We are taught not of taxes, nor bank accounts

Home ec slashed from curriculums, fend for yourself

The mental health crises and homelessness

Are created by a capitalist education

-H. Janicke

Orwellian Nightmare

I drove my grey Jeep
Bought by my short, fat, new husband
With a dark brown mustache

To my new house

This was a two bedroom home
With yellow walls
Light blue and tacky red plastic countertops 
One bedroom had two twin size beds
Assuming we’d have children

I brought my Chick-fil-a inside

And went to sleep with this stranger

My two dogs, a chug and shepherd 

Slept in the large, single-floored living room

A hurricane swelled outside in Long Beach, CA

Sinking the city peninsula

The crashing waves and rising tide

Don’t care about your 6 million dollar property

I felt eerie and paranoid

Like my car was getting towed

The city itself was sinking

And facial recognition cameras lined the streets

The dollar’s becoming obsolete because

Followers are the new currency

Women pay transactional love

Trading their sovereign hand for Joint Tenancy 

I wrote myself a poem

In blue sharpie on the back of my receipt

“This was some Orwellian nightmare,”

I scribbled, because

I write even in my dreams

The Murder of God

God has been murdered
We may not have done it
But we are accomplices
We buried the weapon 
And pretended all was well 
And holy 

Treacherous claim

Isn't it?

Yet every whole contains

Both Masculine and Feminine

God’s wife 

An equal

Not subordinate nor

Lesser in any way

Was slain by the Romans

While Her betrothed lay gagged 

And bound in a room 

Parallel to our own 

The church is a holy lie

More bloodshed and greed 

Than a battlefield stained red

While arms makers grow rich

Baal took God’s place. 

He severed God’s head 

And neatly sewed it atop his own 

The greatest trick ever pulled. 

The most merciless lie in history

A sacrilegious virus

Spread throughout humankind

Generations of the blind and self righteous  

Murdering in the name of God

You fools do not see

The stitched line upon the neck 

Of the church’s god

You do not see the empty chair 

in which God’s wife sat

If God is a man and God alone

Where is there a place for me, our wives,

Or daughters?

If the only God is a man,

Patriarchy must be rational,

Thus man remains superior to woman

Sibilant Games

 

What is a mothers duty 
but to raise her little ones
and spark curiosity in them?
To show love is always the answer
And to protect your own 

before others 

A ducking raised
Around seething snakes
Refusing to partake in the 

killing of others
Or smothering of the 

younger through lies,
trickery, and shaming ways

They mock the little duckling,
her soft flesh so exposed. 
The arched spine, the dry, scaly hiss
A glint of enamel flashes in the light 
The ducks eyes wide-
then a SNAP

The siblings laugh at this game
The duckling frozen stiff 
as if she never played
Her posture of certain death 
gave the snake a slip away,
laughing at the 

duck's little scratch

The Life of A Woman

Initiation 
is finally over;
A light where darkness was.

The life of a woman 

is immensely cyclical

We may die many deaths 
but if our flesh and bones
take its last breath,
it is the creations we birthed
that guide people home.

Just like the lineage 
of female warriors before me,
what I leave behind 
will never be lost;
Eternal life has 

always been ours.

Rose Tea

 

Words are like the weather
They can be cozy as cashmere 

Bundled up
The heat from the fire
Melts the mountain chill

Boots packed with ice crunch and squeak

Steam wets my upper lip and 

dews my nose as I breathe 

into my bone china teacup 

with my favorite rose tea-
Swirling a tea bag is the

perfect repetitive movement 

For a fiddler like me

But words, like the weather,
Can be treacherous too
A monsoon in the desert evening
Winds howling, walls heaving
Against a high-pitched squall 

That yearns to pull the 

earth from its roots

Thunder bellows
Lightning dazzles the night sky
Unless, of course,
You happen to be the thing 
In between
the lightning and the ground

A scorned ego has no friends

only foes

So vengeful a god 

who scolds at random
As the sky cannot bear fury 

a second longer
Electricity rips the atmosphere
And tonight, anyone

could die by lightning strike

The End of "Others"

I love Republicans;
and I love Democrats.
I love Police;
and I love Prisoners.

I love Men;
and I love Women.
I love My Higher Self;
and I love My Shadow.

I love protectors,
and I love instigators
I love the bold,
and I love the shy
I love the abusers,
and I love the abused

There are no "others"
to be against or
to be fearful of

Lay down your weapons,
the fight is over

because there was 
never one to begin with

Veneration

 

Getting high is not a crime
At least, 
Not how it used to be
We came together
Under starry skies
Celebrating our humanity

Sometimes a village 
Sometimes a few men
Connecting spirit 
to the human

Getting high meant

Elevation

Spiritual awakening

Veneration  

The god that flooded the earth

Is a monster

But we have the spark

Of the true Father-

Mother and everything

In between-

Getting high meant

Gathering, laughing,

and singing

We celebrated solstices

Connected to the stars

We danced to drums 

Cosmically knowing

That’s who we are

After the Earth was flooded

To kill the Nephilim 

It only killed our ancestors 

Of humans

The giants being devine

Means they can’t die

So they were forced underground 

Where they continue to hide

Ruling from the shadows

Since the receding tide 

A false matrix created

And ancestral wisdom decimated 

Knowledge left was forced to be hidden

Archons created organized religion

We are just learning now

That’s actually how we got sickened

And our society got twisted

Getting high 

means connecting to the sky

To the real father-mother of creation

The Monad has been calling us forward

We just need to drop the weights 

of guilt and shame

To love again

To celebrate the land

Because darkness can’t hide 

When exposed to the light

Annotated the Sides

 by Hannah Janicke

You may feel powerful

Sitting atop your throne of 

Male-White-Christian 

Separateness

But I’ve been blessed with 

The ability to see what you are too

Scared to see

“The Muslims are terrorists, they 

Burn Christians. The Quran is evil.

Muslims pray to the east and west- 

Their false God.”

I’ve been born into Islamophobia, yet 

I saw through it when I was young.

Naturally, curiously,

I ordered an English Quran 

Online, to learn about this religion 

When my fathers lips 

spew out hatred,

I see a demon 

Caressing his soul

While he gets indignant,

I watch a demon

Cloak his body in a suit 

and veil his eyes so that

He can no longer see 

Anything other than

what’s in his mind

I offer to loan him my Quran 

So he can see that

Muslims and Christians are quite

Alike actually, I even 

Highlighted the passages of peace

With this,

He flew into a rage,

“Why have you read the Quran 

Page for page but you 

Have not read the Bible 

Front to back?”

Calmly responding to his attack,

I said, “Actually, I have. Many times,

and I even annotated the sides.”

He doesn’t see through 

the opaque veil 

Over his eyes

When you’re busy pointing out 

A speck in your brother’s eye,

You don’t even realize

That you too have

A bigger one in yours

The Nobleman and the Psychic

By Hannah Janicke

The nobleman 
was dignified
Never boasted
Nor fretted

New in this town,

But known to the rest

A psychic with

Intuition

He prophesied 
A many things
His foresight was 
Better than his eyes

So our nobleman 
Was quick to his feet
He went straight to 
The psychic 

"Master Master
Please, I have
But one question

Oh, when will I die?"
The nobleman asks,
“So I know where I must avoid.”

The psychic side-eyes him

And says

"Nonsense, no way,
then you’ll be afraid everyday. 

Where there was no fear

Now anxiety creeps

You won’t sleep.”

The nobleman doesn’t understand

So he makes a demand

“I’ll give you money, even
Some land.”

The psychic

In his great wisdom

Says 

“Look here,
If it’s going to come, 
Let it come without worry.

Your fears will not change the future

Worry never rescued anyone
From anything
No matter how much help
One thought it was” 

The Girl Who Saw Red [Update: Published on Bright Flash Literary Review🥂]

by Hannah Janicke

There was a little girl named Lana.

She was bright, curious, and kind.

Her parents were first responders.
They told her, Never wear red.

They had seen too many
people arrested in red,
people dying in red,
families ruined because of red.

So they obsessed over it.
Every dinner, every story ended with the same warning:
Red will ruin you.

Lana, curious as ever, began to wonder.
She read about red in secret,
dreamed of it at night.

One day she came home
with a red bracelet hidden under her sleeve.

Her mother saw it,
ripped it from her wrist.
Beads flew across the floor like drops of blood.
She made Lana pick them up one by one.
She screamed until her face turned red
but never noticed.

Now Lana burned to know more.

By junior year, she found parties
where boys let her wear red.
She slipped it off before coming home,
but inside, she glowed scarlet.

Her father told her about a girl who died in red.
But Lana wasn’t listening anymore.
She was busy planning how to find more.

What could have been a phase became an obsession.
How to wear red and never get caught.
Where to buy it.
Who to trust.

When her parents noticed the look in her eyes,
they sent her away —
to a place where they chained her to a bed,
stripped her of color,
and injected her with a poison to get the red out of her.

They told her stories of people who died in red
while others bled quietly on bathroom floors
because they couldn’t stop.

When Lana came home,
she wasn’t cured.
Now, everywhere she looked,
all she could see was red.