Summer 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

Craftsman

In spare moments,
I watch you work your magic

How you cut and paint
Each slab of wood to perfection

A picture of finality
Though you would never
Call it finished

And now they say
Your work is not needed
You can get this kind of stuff
Online, anywhere

Maybe you can -- but the heartbeat
Will never be felt
And don't get me started
On quality

       Cathy Porter


Cruelty Economics

Punishing people for being poor,
or not born on third base --
armed with shovels,
not silver spoons
those who face real plight
working day and night
in a daily fight to survive
let along thrive,
or live a life of dignity --

Tired of lies,
cruel economics in disguise --
weaponizing myth
of some Welfare Queen
set the scene,
blame for shattered dreams,
waged war on the poor
clinching, grinding more
ignoring your role

In digging a deeper hole --
a reverse Robin Hood,
robbin' the hood,
Appalachia,
hunched over retirees,
and all victims in between
Mother is scorched and smolders --
Big and Beautiful are in the eye
of only one beholder

Intentionally vengefully
prescribing poverty,
to feed their greed
without regret,
another cut in an already weak
safety net --
how much destruction is needed
before we stop supporting
those responsible for it?

      Roy N. Mason


Career Choice

if there was a profession
I half-thought I might tolerate
it was that of librarian.

I liked books.
I liked having books around.
I liked the calmness and silence
of the back stack.

I did nothing about it.
I did not go to college.
there was a terror
and weight of expectation.
three more years of pointless
academic competition.

then the low-paid career
as a public or university
library paper-pusher.

if I thought about
a profession that was it.
instead I became
a drudge on a
twenty year tour of duty
in a printing factory.

two decades
with the machines.
before
the machines
it was short tours of duty
as a restaurant dish washer
member of a landscape crew
janitor and construction
ditch digger.

it was chaos and noise.
it was life reduced and eroded.
I walked out.

there was no back stack
or silence in open spaces.

the low-paid jobs
and life with the working poor
taught me more than any
three year college degree.

      Kurt Nimmo


We Are All Climate Refugees

Why would the supreme court
make it illegal to sleep outside in public spaces
allowing towns & cities all across America
to criminalize, arrest, round up, people without homes
during an affordable housing crisis
that is not being treated like a crisis at all
as more & more Americans fall thru the cracks
deeper into poverty?

Why is there a building boom in privatized for profit prisons
instead of affordable housing during a time when more & more
Americans are being rendered homeless by predatory banks
& natural disasters caused by climate change
(which is caused by capitalism)?

Big money in mass incarceration!

People lose everything
more & more these days
between the floods
& the fires
the tornados filled with flames
predatory banks
& insurance companies who deny claims

We are all climate refugees waiting to happen

You can't head to the hills
anymore

     Dave Roskos


Pastrami on Rye

Langer's Deli charges $25 for
pastrami on rye with
Swiss cheese, cole slaw, and Russian
dressing, not Russian
election interference, not Soviet
Union intervention to assist the migrant
workers. It's not
1933 -- no Wobblies here. It's not
2016 -- no instafacegrambook presidents. It's
2025 -- no fries, you
get a fat juicy pickle,
and some ICE
with that #9 special.

Take your pastrami across the
street into Westlake Park, now MacArthur
Park on a summer's day. The cake
is rancid. It's not
1978 -- no Donna Summer sliding
into your bed. It's
2025 -- ICE is bending you
over, no glove on the baton, no
love. The government (little g, not
Willie G) wants to have its
cake and eat you too.
Devour the kids, the adults,
The grandparents, the eloteros,
Todos los vendedoras.
With military fervor, and anemic
precision. No Swiss,
no neutrality, but a
pickle on the side.

     Joe Hilliard


Culling Human Rights
With a Slur from a Perv
Four Filipino workers detained from a cruise ship for allegedly
possessing child pornography -- Virginian Pilot headline

The children who must will always
be victims in the minds and mouths
of the accusers
The preoccupation is with them,
not the children who are needy,
untaught to imagine growing up,
Their health and futures. Not what
can be done, but won't?

There is so much concern for children
today in Gilead by those who
think and talk or talk without
thinking about doing things to
children all the time.

MURDER WOULD TAKE A BODY

They say Now Now is the time to lock up
aliens. Millions is a good number.
Now is the time to shoot the
rest back anywhere else.

IS THERE MONEY ON THE TABLE?

We can only pray
America will become so pale
it will disappear
Mind the nets
mind the wealth gap
mind THIS and fight

      Mary Franke


Solidarity Revolution

Skin stretched tight across the ribs like the tightest snare drum

Eyes that no longer can focus

Empty gazes at aid workers

The whole land riddled with rubble

Former homes, center of family now just piles of broken dreams and broken people

The genocide of Gaza by Israel is amongst the most horrendous acts of human history

Industrial slaughter of fellow human beings because they are in the only home they know

The violent Right in Israel and the violent Right here have no sense of common humanity

No sense of connection with other human beings

Trying to force us back to white colonial masters and lowly subjects

The orange crumbling emperor and his masters

Just want us to be serfs

Our lives worth less than their machines

That tell them everything

Except how to be human

How to nurture Earth

How to listen for the creator

In creation

How to love humanity

In all its wonderful differences

Real love requires resistance to brutality

Revolution against poverty

Revolution to feed and house the people

To free us all from want in this land of plenty

To wrest with workers their just rewards for their work

Profit is just stolen wages of labor

Revolution for true democracy

Democracy of the economy that has a place and value for all of us.

      Stewart Acuff


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