John Samuel Tieman: Alert
a night in a bunker when we were
kids in fatigues getting high
listening to Hendrix and the cassette stops
Andrew J. Bacevich: Reflections on “Peace” in Afghanistan
However great my distaste for President Trump, I support his administration’s efforts to extricate the United States from Afghanistan….Prolonging this folly any longer does not serve U.S. interests. Rule number one of statecraft ought to be: when you’re doing something really stupid, stop.
Hedy Habra: Topography
Sometimes I think my face is a map,
each line a faint record of hidden scars,
of what I’ve seen or felt.
Paul Christensen: Nutshells
The inside of a nutshell is chambered like the heart, with little ridges and flanges where the nut grew and prepared itself for falling into the waiting earth. That’s what I smell when I hold up a nutshell to my nose. It is the odor of anticipation, the willingness to be sacrificed to the sharp teeth of an animal worrying the shell until it breaks.
Video: In a Nutshell
From a seed to war, from meat to love, from indifference to apocalypse: Director Fabio Friedli uses 3,000 pictures in a montage that attempts to capture the world in a nutshell.
Abby Zimet: The Cruelty is the Point
Sweet mother of God. Racist and cruel doesn’t begin to cover the ongoing atrocities now daily committed – coincidentally, virtually entirely against brown and black people – by the sick demons running our country.
Video: application for the position of abdelhalim hafez’s girl | Poem by Safia Elhillo
i am six months
returned from incense smoke to soften the taste of river water
James Wright: A Blessing
Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,
Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.
And the eyes of those two Indian ponies
Darken with kindness.
Julia Conley: A Solution for All Generations
With her plan for Social Security expansion, Elizabeth Warren demands that the rich pay their fair share to lift 5 million out of poverty: “No one who spends 30 years working and contributing to Social Security should retire in poverty.”
Piper: Why I’m Currently Blocking the Largest Oil Export Channel in the U.S.
Twenty-two activist climbers from Greenpeace blockaded the Fred Hartmann Bridge in Baytown, Texas Thursday morning in order to shutdown what they called “the largest fossil fuel thoroughfare” in the country. Here is a letter from one of the activists on the bridge.
Tamara MacLeod: Lolita understood that some sex is transactional. So did I.
It is perfectly consistent to be deeply critical of the economic and gender inequalities that give rise to sex work, and still advocate for sex workers. The way to deal with cognitive dissonance is to tilt your head a little.
Sydney Lea: To Sydney Lea, Whom I Found Online
You must get tired of requests from witless strange men to meet up.
David V Johnson: Let us now stop praising famous men (and women)
The smog of praise that permeates the upper echelons of society is a product of perverse incentives.
Luray Gross: Curriculum Vitae
Some days I am nothing but bluster. Bluster, and this
small dance I let my hips lean into before they snap back.
