I don’t know about you all, but I am seriously questioning the use of anything tainted by oligarchical lackeys right now. I even question my use of gmail to spread the word but, I have yet to find an alternative. Voices of Tacoma is a project that works to build community through poetry and we continue to host monthly, in-person, poetry events. As we prepare for April (National poetry month, unless that gets banned as well), we got to thinking about analog options… you know, the zine, the handbill, the rag that you put together with your friends, the one that you typed up on a word processor and handed out on the bus or posted on the school bulletin board. Analog is such a beautiful word right now. It will be hard to recreate that world but we have to take back control of what happens with our words after we print them. We have to once again be certain that what we were reading was what the author/poet meant for us to read. Not suggesting a luddite worldview, but we have got to start somewhere. Small letterpresses, handwritten notes, hand drawn posters tacked to power poles. Back to the day when we gather to share our words and enjoy each other’s company instead of keeping our head down and being sucked into the small battery-operated, phallic-replicating, cell phones that are connected to who knows what, and controlled by people we can’t trust. So, here’s the point of this tirade: Voices of Tacoma is going to be celebrating poetry in April with several live, in-person, events. We’re thinking this is a great opportunity to begin a small zine of poetry (maybe a monthly journal) we can hand produce. We don’t have money now to publish this, but we have a printer and a zine stapler, so if we can figure out how to fund the purchase of paper and ink when ours runs out, we’ll be golden. So… send your poems to us. Please keep them short (less than one page each) and make sure to share this with your friends over coffee so they can also submit their poems. We’ll be gathering in April with hopes to spread the good word of poetry in our community. It’s inevitable that we’ll have to use social media to get more people involved, but we’re not selling out by doing so. We will use their virtual world to organize gatherings in the real world, to read poems and celebrate our freedoms together. This is a small step, but it could be the start of a movement. Send your poems to: AGatheringOfPoets@gmail.com. Please keep them under one page in length. Submit as many as you’d like - we’ll figure out the details later. Stay real, live in peace, and be true to yourself. Burl Burl E. Battersby (he/him) *Voices of Tacoma: A Gathering of Poets* A *Tacoma Arts Initiative Program *Project Be! Eugene Be! Creative <https://linktr.ee/voicesoftacoma> (206) 406-8839 <http://voice.google.com/calls?a=nc,%2B12064068839>