Juniper White: The Distance Between Rings
let us sit under our words, a many-
ringed tree, bodies drunk on lost
time, listening to delicate leaves
Tom Engelhardt: The World We are Passing on to our children and grandchildren
Let’s just hope that, when it comes to creating a better world out of such a god-awful mess, the generations that follow us prove better at it than mine did.
Tayve Neese: Blessing the Locusts
Let them, in their fixation,
make one song from a thousand bodies.
Laure-Anne Bosselaar: There was a Room in Antwerp
There was a room in Antwerp I loved so much
I never filled it with books, a bed, or a table.
It was alive with its own clarity
Derrick Z. Jackson: The Chamber of Commerce says it’s woke
Given how many African Americans die because of polluted air, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is no ally. It is just another cop standing to the side as Black folks are being asphyxiated to death.
Audio: Wendell Berry reads ‘The Peace of Wild Things’
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be…
Sandy Solomon: Lost, Departed, Late
In the Serengeti four elephants rest without heads,
bodies rising like boulders from the plain…
Shefali Sharma: Public Money to Plunder the Planet|Development Banks Fund Big Meat and Dairy
The goal should be climate resilience and mitigation that helps empower local communities, indigenous peoples and workers while diminishing market power of oligopolies in agribusiness that drives social and environmental standards towards a race to the bottom.
José Alcantara: Countertop
The granite comes all the way from India,
but when I look closely, I see nebulae.
Lauren Camp: Leather World, This Bird, This Sky
I came here from temporary
and perpetual rages—the whole sky
of wind. Secret birds
take the ruin of garden.
Video: Rouba’s Manifesto
“If you want to change the world, make your life about others. And everything will come back to you.” — Dr. Rouba Mhaissen
Allen Ginsberg: Sunflower Sutra
Jack Kerouac sat beside me on a busted rusty iron pole, companion, we thought the same thoughts of the soul, bleak and blue and sad-eyed, surrounded by the gnarled steel roots of trees of machinery.
Michael Simms: Praise the Poet
Empires fall and buildings crumble, but songs and stories survive.
Miriam Levine: Surfer at Wellfleet
It’s freezing
in the afterglow when he finally rises on his one long ride home.
