Going to sleep, I cross my hands on my chest.
“Save your hands,” my mother says,
seeing me untwist a jar’s tight cap—
just the way she used to tell me
not to let boys fool around
I think of long dead Germans caught in the Bardo.
Are they wagging their fingers at us?
Now you know what it felt like, they say
Carry your light out into the shitstorm,
Joan Baez writes, and what a swirl of turds
it is.
My hands have morphed into my mother’s; arthritic knuckles, thin skin, and yesterday I
discovered her Mah Jong set dumped in a guest closet
As much as 87% of the world’s wetlands have been lost over the past 300 years, with much of this loss happening after 1900, despite their value to the human population.
Tomorrow, I fly home to teach Prometheus—
that story of saving the universe with fire
and then enduring the eagle punishment
but my raised voice will be for my father
“Now you. Just remember
when you were a bear.”
In 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court ended a woman’s right to a safe and legal abortion in the United States. “Contractions” takes us to Memphis, Tennessee where we contemplate the discontinuation of abortion services at a women’s health clinic.
it is truth, that we came here, I told you,
from other planets
where we were lords, we were sent here,
for some purpose
So, what’s to be done? Why, educate, of course, and stop running scared.
Every butterfly knows that the end
is different from the beginning
and that it is always a part
of a longer story
The 12-step method that began with Alcoholics Anonymous is a form of mutual aid that can help movement organizers take better care of each other.
We oddly felt we’d come home when, having left behind the dreadful heat and crowds of Rome, we settled into a rented house in Umbria, a sturdy little structure built in 1434