Autumn 2025



The Blue Collar Review is a quarterly journal of poetry and prose published by Partisan Press. Our mission is to expand and promote
a progressive working class vision of culture that inspires us and that moves us forward as a class. The work presented is
only a sampling from the magazine. Subscriptions are $20.00 yearly, or $7.00 for a single issue.
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Poetry Samples from the Latest Issue

Thirteen Minutes

Greasy handprints on the window. A clean streak
Where my fingers knifed through dust
On the sill. A shotgun loaded, hidden
Behind the bedskirt's shadow. Susie's hair
Curling into the open end of her
Pillow case, chest rising and falling
Softly and slowly, the gaps in her rib cage
Smooth holsters for my callused fingers. Moonlight glosses
Our blue carpet and I think of Lake Huron,
Those brisk spring evenings when the walleye fishermen
cast weighted lines like spider webs
into twilight. The red digits on my alarm clock
glow like an exit sign. Thirteen minutes
before that black box starts singing,
before I tap its head with the side meat
of my clenched fist. I don't want another
shift cutting cured concrete slabs
in a parking structure off Gratiot Ave. I want
to lie here next to Susie and watch dawn
creep through the window, its warm mouth
slow crawling across the floor to leave a kiss
on her bare ankle that hangs off the edge
of our bed. I want to give her what I was too back-sore
to deliver after dinner last night, to revisit my teenage
libido, those years with nuclear power
pulsing between my legs. I'm melting, hard living
dripping like sweat down my face. I'm afraid
not knowing how she'll love me once my body can't
work the way it does now. Four minutes until I roll
out of bed and walk down the hall towards the kitchen
for a cup of coffee, a hand full of pain pills, the struggle
to bend over and lace my boots and start
the westbound I-94 commute. Two hours
until the sweet smell of fresh mortar sticks
in my nostrils, until the blades hum
in my ears, and I hock loogies
straight through clouds of dust
blowing across the jobsite.

       Jeff Thomas


Midwifery

Before vast brick wombs our sons are midwives,
delivering silvery steel from Braddock mills with
waste gas from iron molten.
Furnace tapping and teeming with flames scorching
skin as impurities burn off the rising slag.
For sixteen hours they labor bent before the rupture,
faces slick as they shoulder coal
and bear down as ladles swell and crown.
She is a mighty mother delivering hard bodies,
hard wills, swallowing sons like an offering.
The remaining men chew through her.
She contracts like a metallic,
fettered umbilical cord.

       Kristen Pantle


Unfinished

It's the end of a miserable nightshift,
and two workmates face a final
goodbye, an alliance forged in the furnace of hell.

Twenty-five years of hanging on jokes and foolery,
their shared bonds more significant
than the sum of their collective grief combined.

Sixty thousand hours of tussle and grit
are compressed no into a capsule of time that will
skate past the turnstiles of the factory floor.

One man is leaving; the other will stay.
Both men shake hands.
One turns to the locker room, the other to the door,

but before leaving, pauses. Turns back. There was
something more he needed to say.

      Keith Gorman


A History Ahistorism

Once upon a time some of us here
had a grandfather who either was
enslaved or enslaver.

And then later once upon that next time --
-- call the second one "freedom" --
had an ancestor who was a judge
who sent anyone (often Black)
back to the sort of person who
bought trapped people to work for
free. Or had a trapped ancestor --
who still managed to be an ancestor.

And then the private prisons American
archipelago, but how to get more profit?

All over America slave pens are being
built to contain people who yesterday
might have been joining a union,
(night planes take the unfit elsewhere).

Someone has to do the work
and so this foul institution
is brought back with enforced pride.
Not at the auction block, workers
can be traded on shopify, Amex-
the department of human resources
will lose the word human
The tax-exempt rich will get government issue.

       Mary Franke


Missing Out

Why don't you go to Tijuana
or Ensenada I am told. They
have good places to eat and
good cantinas over there. I
tell them I would rather stay
here. There is good food here
too, and also good cantinas.
You don't know what you are
missing I am told. The beach
is so beautiful there. I tell
them the beach is beautiful
here too, even though I hardly
ever go. The real reason is a
long story I am not ready to
share. I am also afraid of not
being able to return. I am a
citizen, but I have not renewed
my passport. You can call me
lazy or dumb. I can bring my
certificate of naturalization.
But what if they steal it and
I can't come back. Perhaps
I have seen to many movies
of what happens to people
like me, not born in this country.

     Luis Cuauhtémoc Berriozabal


For Denise Levertov

So the sun shines
on my loneliness,
as it shines on those imprisoned
for the crime of dark skin,
the wrong language,
and fleeing a country
full of terror and poverty,
only to come
to this land of hat and terror.

My life
is a small speck,
but I must make my voice
as large as I can,
to be of use
in this dark land.

     Raymond A. Mazurek


Jimmy Was in the Army

Jimmy used to play Army when he was a kid,
had plastic soldiers, tanks, a bridge too far.

Jimmy dropped out of high school and joined
right up. He wanted to be a good TV American,
find himself an enemy, and heroically make
that enemy pay for being an enemy. Respect
that uniform, Private, his drill sergeant yelled,
and what it stands for, you shit eating maggot!

Jimmy says: the day your term of service is up
and you walk out in your civvies, that's your real
first day of boot camp. Want a job? Siryessir!

Jimmy got a job at the furniture factory, joined
the Union, was a good hometown picnic American.
When the Union voted to strike, Jimmy enlisted
for the trenches of the picket line, saw the police
drop their civic masks and become the rent-a-cops
for the factory owners. And when the strike
began to spread, the National Guard arrived
to restore "law and order" on the orders
of their uptown and downtown Lords.
Jimmy kissed his wife goodbye at the door and joked:
Bye, honey! I'm off to walk point!

Jimmy learned that he's the enemy. He's the gook,
the dink, the raghead. He's every slur
that a crosshair ever found. He's Charlie,
whose checkpoint is everywhere, and his village
needs to be destroyed in order to save it.
Jimmy marches up to a gung-ho weekend warrior
practicing his thousand yard stare in crisp camo.
Jimmy eyeballs him, gives him name, rank,
serial number and says: listen up, soldier!
If you're standing tall here, on full metal holiday,
locking and loading in my town, on my street, who
is occupying the street where you grew up?
Who is holding a gun on your mom, on your kid brother?
Jimmy says: attention, soldier! Respect
who wears that uniform and don't let it wear you.
Then Jimmy does an about face and saunters away.

This Guardsman looks at Jimmy then he sneers
and snorts and makes a big show of readying his weapon.
And then he sees a little girl in a Disneyland t-shirt
looking at him, and a woman with a baby on her hip,
and a bent old man in a baseball cap, and a pimply
high school kid wearing a letter jacket, and someone
who looks like his dad. And they're all looking at
him, and there in the middle is Jimmy and Jimmy says:

Welcome home, Recruit.

      Robert Edwards


I Write my Poems to Remember
The Ancient Rain is falling all over America now
The music of the Ancient Rain is heard everywhere -- Bob Kaufman, Ancient Rain

i write my poems to remember

i dream my dream to remember

The poet must not forget

the sweet being called human must not forget

the thinking must continue to think

anguish & fear is not forgettable

the emperor & his legions never forget

the emperor & his legions have replaceable names

they have interchangeable names

they endure in spite of human miracles

they wear clever masks

they have kicked the messiah off the doorstep

they have armed god with human weaponry

worshipers of the emperor are skeletons who comb their hair

        & jockey for a place at the emperor's side

they are untied by their self-aggrandizement & the

        cowardice of their role

they appear again & again

they appear as me and you, therefore we must remember

        who we are

they have the capacity to alter life as we live it

when the rich become hungry, plump babies beware

the emperor is a beast

the world becomes energized by the beast's snarl

the world rolls on with ego-centric blather

the beast is always hungry, therefore we must always remember
        who we are

we must never forget, lest we be altered, perhaps forever

the beast continues to exist

the beast prowls under the moon & at midday

DREAMER! COME OUT OF YOUR DAYDREAM & SHOUT!

POET! PICK UP YOU PEN AND SHOOT!

we also continue to exist, therefore we must always continue


        normal


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