On This Day of Awakening.

• Author: Gomez, Magdalena
• Position: Poem

(For the people of Egypt, you are bread for a starving world )

For you, with fists in your voice, who without arms or rope break the aberrant mule. (All apologies to brother mule who once carried water to my mother's mouth.) For you, who plant lush gardens in the putrid fields of caution, rousing the dead into epiphanies and face to face contact. For you, who shame the silence of tyranny's allies those thugs with perfect teeth and unworn boots, who tug at straining vests from safe distances; their only rebellion a rumbling, soft stomach. Threats arrive from the sewers of greed, where secrets, and soldiers huckstered from their youth, are buried beneath lies of bread. The helicopters, the trucks, the guns, the planes, the shadows, the sounds, the gas, the smoke, the looks, the signals, the orders. Check all of the above for stamps of origin. Cobra rears up straight from broken ground, dips her...