Rebecca Gordon: Social Security Versus National Security
The U.S. “national security” budget is still the third rail of politics in this country.
Majid Naficy: The Engraver
You put on your eyeglasses
And read me your daughter’s will
Word by word.
Dawn Potter| Nocturne: A Marriage
In the ancient night
the vines of summer choke
breath choke memory
blooms fatten and fall
Leslie Anne Mcilroy: On the Rocks
I love my son so much I no longer call him my daughter. He presses his bound breasts to me when I hug him hello and goodbye. He wants them … Continue reading
Daniel Burston: An Open Letter to Steve Kowit on his poem “Intifada”
Right now, civil conversation on these subjects is difficult to impossible to sustain because both the Zionist and the Palestinian narratives have been carefully curated to highlight the harms that each side inflicted on the other, and to minimize or ignore the harms that they inflicted on their adversaries.
Steve Kowit: Intifada
bekippad Sabras dance thru the Tel Aviv streets chanting
gleefully: No school tomorrow in Gaza; all of their children are dead.
Patricia Jabbeh Wesley: When I Shut the Door
The news arrived by e-mail — a scribble of a long, single sentence, broken up, like little chunks of wood, the way a year is broken up into months and weeks, days, hours.
Derrick Z. Jackson: Building Back Severed Communities
The Biden administration wants to reconnect historically Black and Latino neighborhoods cut off by highway construction. There’s promise and peril in that.
Linda Parsons: Checkers with my Granddaughter
She’s not out for blood but, like her father,
a natural strategist and soon has me
in her grasp.
Paul Christensen: Early Dog Days in Vermont
It used to be you could live in Vermont without an air conditioner, or even a fan. The stores were very sparing in their shelf space for such things. Now, all the big retailers pile up boxes of cheap rattling room coolers as early as May, and sell them off.
Video: Ode to Desolation
Jim Henterly mans the historic fire tower on Desolation Peak, where he safeguards not only the surrounding national park lands, but the proud and passionate history of his profession.
Arlene Weiner: You’re Not Doing Enough!
A response to The Ministry for the Future, a novel by Kim Stanley Robinson. Orbit. 563 pp. I hope this is an important book. It’s speculative fiction, the term an expansion of … Continue reading
Jose Padua: Silent Tongues in the House of the Rising Sun
what’s even more beautiful
is that tonight in my small sleepy town
I can look up to the sky and see
a deep blue silence surrounding
a half, nearly see-through moon
Daisy Fried: So Much Depends on WCW
William Carlos Williams was a furious poetic revolutionary — furiously working over a lifetime to reinvent American poetry, furious at poetry he considered backward, and at critics and editors who … Continue reading
Aidan Rooney: Tropical Evening (after Ida Faubert)
Come breathe with me the sidewalk scents and
exhale into the night my erratic soul.
