Abby Zimet: Until Our Last Breath
In the last 22 months, the Israeli military has killed over 230 journalists, including multiple ones from Al Jazeera.
Chard deNiord: On Such An Evening
everything just gets sweeter as I sit under
the maple after working all day in the garden
and listen to the music of silence disguised
as birdsong and breeze in the overstory
Thom Hartmann | Urgent Message to Progressives: Infiltrate Your Local Democratic Party Before It’s Too Late
Take over the party from the inside, from the bottom up!
Rachel Hadas: Two Poems
One sight that sticks with me is the tail
of a blue phoenix soaring on a tile
from fifteenth-century Turkey. I couldn’t draw it
worth a damn, but gazed until I knew it.
I used the pencil in my hand to see.
Aviva Chomsky: The Nightmare in Gaza
Weaponizing Antisemitism as a Shield to Enable Genocide
Kurt Brown: High Diver
Now she pivots like a dancer, gripping the board
with her toes, and rises as it quivers with her weight
then settles again. She waits until it stops,
until she gathers herself up to balance there,
tall and undeniable, her back to us in the withering light.
Baron Wormser: If
If, as a poet suggested a long while ago, the center is not holding. If morality no longer has any practicable basis. If public statements are cant and platitude. If … Continue reading
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer: Doors Where I Have Knocked
Door of forgiveness that’s never locked.
Door of dreams. Door of god.
Door of contentment without a knob
that can only be entered with empty hands.
Dion O’Reilly: Subject C, the Numinous, and Ellen Bass’s ‘Gate C-22’
“…the pure pleasure of the numinous poem, which, in the final analysis, might contain our personal myths, successful in the way myths are successful, in their transmission of complexity, magic, and the paradoxes of this painfully-beautiful world.”
Sean Sexton: Herculaneum (audio and painting email to Robert Cording)
I’m reading Basho’s “Backroads to the North Country,” on my trip, an old, crumbling Penguin classics series that includes four separate journeys and a great intro. He conveys at one point how grateful he is to be on the road, Mt Fuji far away back home in Edo, so he needn’t ponder it in his life for awhile.
Hayden Saunier: The Spin
My washing machine won’t operate
without the matte black hardcover
American Heritage Dictionary, Fifth Edition,
placed atop its lid. I no longer question this.
Gary Fincke: Schmaltz
My mother
Said we could shimmy it off in no time,
Doing the Twist and the Mashed Potato,
The dances of the slim who’d never heard
Of real schmaltz and the terrible success
Of learning place
Betsy Sholl: Monet’s Garden
When he was painting his lilies,
when he was refusing evacuation
despite the war being close enough
to hear from his garden,
was Monet offering the world lilies,
saying there are lilies as well as guns?
Jordan Smith: These Days
The danger of elegy is that it just tells us what we already know: we lose and suffer and become the subject of the loss and suffering of others. Liam had no patience for what he called the “I fall upon the thorns of life, I bleed” school of poetry.
