Instructions for Driving at Night
After Tarfia Faizullah
He pulled me over. Third time this week. First time
at night. His sirens screamed red. The sky a ripe
melon. The sky a girl on the street driving
into the open mouth of dark. He swatted
my face with his baton. He swatted my lips
with the butt end of his flashlight. He wielded
the baton like a finger to touch my breasts.
He used his flashlight to get a better look.
His car was full. His colleagues joined in. I fell
against the parking brake, the car rolled forward.
I fell and he used his baton. I remember
I love marionettes. I love how a string
is pulled and its puppet jerks to life. I did
not apologize to him for making him
pull me over. The girls on their hot pink bikes
and matching helmets cycled faster past us.
Girls breaking away from our bloodletting. Girls
tossing their bikes onto grass behind the white
picket fence, and running inside. I fell when
he pulled me out of the car. I was too dark
for them to rape me. He thought my skin was a
contagion. His friends joined in, rendered my
body fruit salad. My face cherry compote.
My pomegranate heart exploded open.
I kept watch for Hades and Persephone.
After a while I closed my eyes. I saw stars
being born, the big bang that comes before light
travels. I knew not to speak. I knew not to
cry. I knew it would get worse. But I cried out.
I cried out for my mother, hundreds of miles
away. I cried for hundreds of mothers, ones
on the other side of those picket fences.
I cried for my friends but I could no longer
remember their names. I cried though all I could
see were their faces, milky outlines, makings
of constellations. Stars already dead but
still shining holy, night after night. Flashlights
moving the traffic along, his breath a spray
of petrol before the fire starts and looting
begins. He wished aloud for my death. Someone
called an ambulance so I lived to hear
on the six o’clock news that I was a slut
with a car, resisting arrest, deserving
the prizes I received from his giving arms.
My mother did not cry but asked if I had
apologized, kept my head down low, staring
at the mat under my sandaled feet. I said
no and through her sudden tears, she smiled.
Devi S. Laskar is a native of Chapel Hill, N.C. She holds an MFA from Columbia University in New York. A former newspaper reporter, she is now a poet, photographer and artist. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Atlanta Review, Fairy Tale Review, Noyo River Review and The Raleigh Review, which nominated her for Best New Poets 2016. She is an alumna of both TheOpEdProject and VONA/Voices, and poetry workshops at the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley. Finishing Line Press published the first of two poetry chapbooks, Gas & Food, No Lodging in March 2017, and Anastasia Maps in December 2017. She now lives in California.
Jessica Barksdale’s fourteenth novel, The Burning Hour, was published by Urban Farmhouse Press in April 2016. A Pushcart Prize and Best-of-the-Net nominee, her short stories, poems, and essays have appeared in or are forthcoming in the Waccamaw Journal, Salt Hill Journal, Little Patuxent Review, Carve Magazine, Palaver, and So to Speak. She is a Professor of English at Diablo Valley College in Pleasant Hill, California and teaches online novel writing for UCLA Extension. She holds an MA in English Literature from San Francisco State University and an MFA from the Rainier Writers Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University.
Laura Secord has been an offset printer, union organizer, health care activist, teacher, and a sex-educator. For thirty years, she combined the life of a writer and performer with a career as a Nurse Practitioner in HIV care. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing from Sierra Nevada College. A Pushcart nominee, her poems have appeared in the Birmingham Weekly, Arts and Understanding, The Southern Women’s Review, PoemMemoirStory, Passager, Indolent Books and Burning House Press. She is the co-founder of Birmingham’s Sister City Spoken Word Collective.
Jamie Lynn Heller uses poetry as her caffeine. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee (Little Balkans Review 2014) and Best of the Net nominee (805 Lit + Art 2016). Her chapbook Domesticated was published in 2015 (Finishing Line Press). She received honorable mention awards in Whispering Prairie Press Writing Contest 2012, and Kansas Voices Contest 2017, 2011. For a complete list of publications see 
Vincent Francone is a writer from Chicago whose memoir, Like a Dog, was published in the fall of 2015. He won first place in the 2009 Illinois Emerging Writers Competition (Gwendolyn Brooks Award) and is at work on a collection of poems and stories. Visit 
Bryan D. Dietrich is the author of six books of poems and co-editor of a recent poetry anthology. He has published poems in The New Yorker, The Nation, Poetry, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, The Paris Review, Harvard Review, Yale Review, and many other journals. He has won The Paris Review Prize, a “Discovery”/The Nation Award, a Writers at Work Fellowship, and others.
Theresa Hamman is a poet from La Grande, OR. Her poems can be found in the following literary journals and magazines: Red Savina Review, The Tower Journal, Oregon East, basalt, and Nailed. She also teaches undergraduate composition and creative writing courses at Eastern Oregon University and Southern New Hampshire University. She earned her MFA in 2016 from Eastern Oregon University, where she was also the editor of the student literary journal Oregon East. Although she enjoys writing in all creative genres, her first love is poetry. She gets lost in the musicality of it and how it bends language to create new objects.
Rosalie Sanara Petrouske received her M.A. in English and Writing from Northern Michigan University in Marquette, Michigan. She is an Adjunct Professor in the English Department at Lansing Community College, where she currently teaches Freshman Composition and Creative writing classes. Finishing Line Press published her second book of poems What We Keep in 2016. She wrote the poem “Burnt” about an unusual long and hot Michigan summer, but it’s also about want, and about the things you might want, and never have.
In 2009 Barbara Knott’s poem “Boxwood” was selected by Judge Nikki Giovanni as first-prize winner of the New Millennium Writings Awards 28 prize for poetry. In 2010 Francois Camoin chose her short story “Song of the Goatman” as third-prize winner in the Writers at Work fiction competition. Barbara’s chapbook of poems Soul Mining was published in 2011 by Finishing Line Press. Another chapbook, MANTA Poems, came out in March 2015, also published by Finishing Line Press. Her short story “The Legend of Abigail Jones” received first prize in the wild card category of Atlanta Writers Club’s Spring 2014 competitions. Barbara was selected with a group of poets to represent FLP as readers at the Abroad Writers’ Conference in Dublin, December 2015.
Annette Langlois Grunseth has a BA in Communications from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and is a lifetime member of the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets. Her poems have appeared in Wisconsin Academy Review, Midwest Prairie Review, SOUNDINGS: Door County in Poetry, The Poetry Box/Poeming Pigeons, The Ariel Anthology and other publications. Several of her nature poems were set to original music and performed at Acadia University in Nova Scotia. She is retired from a career in Marketing and Public Relations and lives in Green Bay, Wisconsin, with her husband John, where they both advocate for equal rights. She is the author of Becoming Trans-Parent, One Family’s Journey of Gender Transition (Finishing Line Press).
The Paddock Review 