Sydney Lea: A Busy Life
I’m an old man now, and I do acknowledge a certain kind of pointlessness, namely my occasionally fervent striving to decode my life’s “meaning,” and even the world’s. In saner moments, I can actually consider the futility of such an endeavor a relief and a blessing.
Elizabeth Romero: Phantom Director
What a bandied about word love is but what other word for the way
Your voice
reaches inside me as though it were my own?
Jessica Corbett: Democracy Watchdog Exposes ‘Heartbreaking Catalog of DOGE’s Depredations’
“We hope that this report will show the public how dangerous a madman Elon Musk is, and why corrupt billionaires, with zero experience in governance, have no place making decisions for career officials.”
Philip Levine: The Poem of Chalk
He knew feldspar,
he knew calcium, oyster shells, he
knew what creatures had given
their spines to become the dust time
pressed into these perfect cones
Abby Zimet: The Promised Land | When Fate Looks Upon You
OMG. We have landed in an inane, insane, bombastic Monty Python skit, slap-dash improvised by a sick vengeful child king churning through endless hissy fits.
H C Palmer: Two Poems
My father believed the bedrock beneath our ranch—
once an immense sea—
was still alive, that natural rhythms persisted
in its sluggish consolidation.
Alex Crisp: The Next Frontier of Climate Accountability Is Making Big Food Pay Its Ecological Bill
The “polluter pays” principle is a cornerstone of environmental regulation.
Naomi Shihab Nye: 300 Goats
O lead them to a warm corner,
little ones toward bulkier bodies.
Lead them to the brush, which cuts the icy wind.
Another frigid night swooping down
Umme Hoque & Daniel Hunter: How We Pressured an Airline to End Its Contract With ICE
Success required a mix of local and national organizing, direct action, and political pressure alongside the better-known boycott.
Moudi Sbeity: Watching the Tall Burly Man at the Ice Cream Shop Lick His Cone
I watched him walk away from the register,
all rough and tarnished, hard in the heart –
I could tell – even mad in the eyes, lifting the
cone to his slightly cocked head, tongue sticking
out, wiping itself in a swirl along the sugar spire.
Gwendolyn B. Bennet: Four Poems
Something of old forgotten queens
Lurks in the lithe abandon of your walk
And something of the shackled slave
Sobs in the rhythm of your talk.
Audio: Dr. Martin Luther King — Beyond Vietnam: A Time To Break Silence
A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.
Sean Sexton: Heavenward
An orange glow back-lights the sky before dawn
with approaching newness made of blue. The world
still drips from a perfect midafternoon rain arriving
yesterday to carry into dark.
Malcolm Daniel: The photography of Julia Margaret Cameron
In Cameron’s Mountain Nymph, Sweet Liberty, Miss Keene, an arresting model about whom we know nothing but her last name, stares directly at the camera (and, by extension, at the viewer), her hair loose and her eyes open wide. Filling the frame, she seems to step out of the picture.
