by Mathilda Cullen. The doctor told me she would never speak / to me again. “I can’t believe I have you,” she said to me. / It was a miracle, a communism collapsing speech altogether.
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Why We Strike
by C.M. Lewis. Worker militancy and the labor movement are in the public eye in a way not seen in decades. In the past three years, workers have struck—at times illegally—in huge numbers, especially in the education sector.
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The Capitol Was Stormed Long Ago
by Shane Burley. There are key flashpoints that define the Trump years. The escalator speech. The “total and complete shutdown.” Charlottesville. But these were not qualitatively dissimilar from the bulk of his Presidential term, during which racism and violence became ubiquitous.
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Against Testing
by KJ Shepherd. The U.S. education system has long wedded itself to an entire industry of standardized social sorting, which leads students to see themselves as a quantifiable commodity from an early age and, eventually, to borrow against their future.
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2020: Year in Review
Protean was honored to feature the work of dozens of talented writers, poets, and artists this year, both in print and online. Here’s a selection of our publications from 2020.
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Her Socialist Smile is a Portrait of a Woman Misremembered
by Amelia Merrill. Socialism was not a niche part of Keller’s life, but the crux of it. As a member of the Industrial Workers of the World, she called for nationwide workers’ strikes and revolution, bemoaning that her fans and benefactors wanted to sanitize her image.
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Blood Red Lines: An Interview with Brendan O’Connor
Brendan O’Connor: I came to writing about the far right during the occupation of the Malheur Wildlife Refuge in 2016. I was working at Gawker at the time, and there were already people covering the story, so I had to look around for other angles in because I really felt like there’s something very strange going on here.
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Loom
by Stephanie Cawley. A machine weaves cloth / so a woman can write / a poem. The machine weaves / so one woman can write
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The Origins of Cling Wrap
by ish ibrahim. See Kyoko now, on a white roof with white plaster, pipes like candy canes jutting out, sealed at their base with white plaster. See the pipes spewing mysterious white smoke. There is a blue sky with occasional white clouds.
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You Can Only Watch
by M.K. Anderson. There’s a meme going around based on the old philosophical thought experiment of the trolley problem. Instead of branching trolley tracks—one track with people tied to it, one without, and a man at the switch—it’s just one track with a trolley running over a long line of victims.
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