H.G. Reza: Living While Brown in America
Walking through a Home Depot parking lot while being brown raises enough reasonable suspicion in an immigration agent’s mind to cause my detention for a citizenship check…
Joan E. Bauer: Brown Skin | Probable Cause
My niece says they’ve raided the carwash.
Her former nanny, a longtime citizen,
afraid to leave home.
Stephen Dobyns: Prague
The day I learned my wife was dying
I told myself if anyone said, Well, she had
a good life, I’d punch him in the nose.
How much life represents a good life?
Charlotte Matthews: Fog Count at Fluvanna Women’s Correctional Center
…pregnant women are shackled even in labor. They are allowed to have their babies with them for one week, then they are taken away. Most will never see their children again
Kurt Brown: The Kiss
That kiss I failed to give you.
How can you forgive me?
George Yancy: I Am on Kirk’s “Professor Watchlist.” I Know How It Destroys Civil Debate.
I deeply value free speech and debate. The watchlist created by Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA is anathema to both.
Eleanor Lerman: Fiddlestick
Admit nothing tonight: break everything
that can be broken and banished and
let it be known that the heart
is nothing but an old fiddlestick
lying forgotten in the grass
Rabbi Angela Buchdahl: The Cries of Isaac and Ishmael
We can feel brokenhearted for the suffering of the children of Isaac and of Ishmael. We must.
Jordan Smith: Parts of the Same Project,
Awake to a language he didn’t know,
A woman by a window, her silhouette
Between light crossing a meadow
Audio: Son House performing County Farm Blues
Put you under a man called “Captain Jack”
Put you under a man they call “Captain Jack”
He’ll sure write his name up and down your back
Barbara Crooker: Patty’s Charcoal Drive-In
First job. In tight black shorts
and a white bowling shirt, red lipstick
and bouncing ponytail, I present
each overflowing tray as if it were a banquet.
Jessica Corbett: Spain Joins Italy in Sending Ship to Protect Gaza-Bound Sumud Flotilla
The UN special rapporteur for the occupied Palestinian territories implored other countries “to mobilize their fleet to grant the flotilla safe sailing to Gaza, and deploy a real humanitarian convoy to break the blockade.”
Jane Mead: Passing a Truck Full of Chickens/at Night on Highway Eighty
I saw the one that made me slow some—
I lingered there beside her for five miles.
Frida Berrigan: Preparing for Scarcity
The truck wheel’s inner tube was right in front of me, no longer half-submerged in the pond’s late summer muck. After so many hot weeks without rain, the water had dried up and the garbage was completely exposed.
