Derrick Z. Jackson: A Cruel Tradeoff | Building the “Amazon of Deportation” While Tearing Down Health and Human Services
The Trump administration wants to spend $45 billion to build an inhumane deportation industry while planning to cut at least $40 billion in life-saving programs from the Department of Health and Human Services
Thomas McGuire: Garden Plots
I’ve come to half believe what Ho Chi Minh
said about his need for more poets
who could lead a charge, sharpen bayonets.
Meg Kearney: Two Sonnets
And what emotional impulse leads you
to speak of the heart, that cliché, its chambers
for sleeping, for weeping, and remember
the chamber for repair—of course you do
Barbara Hamby: Ode on My Mother’s Handwriting
Her a’s are like small rolls warm from the oven, yeasty,
fragrant, one identical to the other, molded
by a master baker, serious about her craft, but comical, too,
smudge of flour on her sharp nose
Video: Hustle Mode
A young and idealistic single mother collects recyclable bottles from the streets of NYC, as she tries to wrangle her 2-year-old daughter and 9-year-old dog.
Pablo Otavalo: You Wake Up
and one day you are a vermin. And
your brother a vermin
and your son is a vermin.
Sandy Solomon: Reading
The pasts, the past perfects: each sentence
a forest pool shining with borrowed,
broken light
James Crews: Meditation Class
I wiped the fog from the glass and saw
a statue of the Buddha on a shelf, laughing
at himself, laughing at me standing there
in a puddle, under a pine tree that kept
dripping on my head
Julia Conley: ‘Genocide in Action’ as 60-Day Blockade Plunges Gaza Into Mass Starvation
The two-month-long siege is a “clear and calculated effort to collectively punish over two million civilians and to make Gaza unlivable.”
Fleur Adcock: Happy Ending
After they had not made love
she pulled the sheet up over her eyes
until he was buttoning his shirt:
not shyness for their bodies – those
they had willingly displayed – but a frail
endeavor to apologise.
Jessica Kutz: The Gender Gap on Climate
A new report shows a growing gender gap among people who vote with environmental issues in mind.
Jan Beatty: My Father’s Houses
My father stands lean and young
in the formica kitchen, drinking a shot of Imperial.
He shoots his head back/swallows it all/
slams down the shot glass/turns around and says:
That’s good stuff.
Kevin Dann: Why Seashells Resemble Spiraling Galaxies and the Human Heart
From dissecting hearts to designing ornithopters, James Bell Pettigrew saw spirals as the blueprint of nature—but his grand vision was lost to history.
Laure-Anne Bosselaar: Nostalgia
Nostalgias we share with friends
around a good table, nodding yes, yes, to our
glad sadnesses as we bring back a taste, a kiss,
that one song we will never forget.
