Zia Kandler and Moira Birss: How to build emergency response systems for the long haul
The international accompaniment movement teaches us that to sustain an emergency response to state violence, we must build durable, collective and supportive structures now.
Sydney Lea: Final Visit
He kept awkwardly laying a hand across his forehead, trying to cover his eyes. He’d done that a lot by then. Ever the iron-butt Yankee, he meant to hide his tears, though … Continue reading
Tony Magistrale: Family Man
For forty years a compliant prisoner
in his own home. Work his addiction and escape,
his only refuge against the daily humiliations,
the tedious boredom, the inane dinner chatter.
Jessica Corbett: Bernie Sanders’ 7 Policies to Defeat Trump and Secure a Better Future for All
“It is not good enough just to be critical of Trump and his destructive policies. We must bring forth a positive vision that will improve the lives of ordinary Americans.”
Cesare Pavese: Passion for Solitude
Everything stands isolated before my senses,
which accept it calmly: a rustling of silence.
There’s nothing in this darkness I couldn’t know,
the way I know my blood is running through my veins.
George Yancy: Black Men Endured Sexual Exploitation Under Slavery. Their Story Is Rarely Told.
There were no legal protections against the rape of enslaved Black women or enslaved Black men.
Dorianne Laux: Spirit Level
I see how my whole life has been a dream,
one she built for me from the ground up,
her daughter, my mother the axe, beautiful
tool with which she shaped me, a house
much like the one she lived in, but smaller
Desne A. Crossley: Alzheimer’s and Missing Love (2015-2017, 1996 & 1950)
Watched the movie Hidden Figures (when the first black women worked in the Nasa space program) and almost cried. My father was a rocket scientist, something I didn’t realize until his brain was already gone to Alzheimer’s.
Delmore Schwartz: O Love, Sweet Animal
O Love, dark animal,
With your strangeness go
Like any freak or clown:
Appease the child in her
Because she is alone
Catherine Gonick: Gazing at a Model of Australopithecus
She might have clung to her freedom
to live among leaves a while longer,
in paradise not quite lost.
Ma Yongbo: Three poems for Helen Pletts in English & Chinese
No one can walk here,
save shy deer, save wind and rain,
save those invisible wings
that can gently lift the whole garden
up to the constellations.
Laure-Anne Bosselaar: Lassitude
the stars barely visible above the oil rigs off the coast,
aglow like phantom ships
Video: Inside, The Valley Sings
Trapped in the never-ending horror of solitary confinement, three prisoners in the United States seek comfort and escape in the boundless landscapes of their own imaginations.
Wilson R. M. Taylor: Two Poems
Today I said goodbye to my mother
for a few weeks. Five months ago,
the doctor estimated she had six to twelve
to live. I fly back and forth to replace futures
we’ve lost; I leave long scars in the atmosphere.
