Wayne Hsiung: The 10,000-Year Famine
The failure of storytelling leads to calamity. Hannah Arendt, in her studies of atrocities, notes that they are typically the result of inattention rather than malice.
Taqwa Ahmed Al-Wawi: Those With Chronic Illness in Gaza Say They’re Denied a Bare Minimum to Survive
This is an engineered famine — deliberate starvation under Israeli siege: Markets are empty. Aid trucks are blocked. Weeds are being boiled for soup.
Todd Friedman: Two Poems
Israel, you have become like Joseph’s brothers
who abandoned him in an empty cistern
and then sat down to a feast.
Mary B. Moore: Gloria, Arbored
The foliage simmers or shivers,
airs itself out, and the round
leaf-scales, which join and branch,
make each stem a flat little tree:
a tree of trees.
Video: Eternity
Valerie and Alan have been married 57 years. Eternity is a look at love that lasts a lifetime, whether they like it or not.
Andrea Mazzarino: How MAGA Uses Violence to Consolidate Power
Cruelty is the point.
Betsy Sholl: Haibun | Tarantula
Our creature, named Slash, also bulked up. He had a taste for crickets we fed each week…
Ghada Abu Muaileq: In Gaza, Even the Cost of a Grave Has Become a Luxury
We tear up chairs for firewood. Soap is watered down to make it last. Basic necessities are increasingly out of reach.
Baron Wormser: Distressed
Since grade school when I was hunched under my desk during an air-raid drill, I have been distressed by the specter of the atomic bomb.
John Guzlowski: Hunger
He ate what would kill a man
in the normal course of his life:
leather buttons, cloth caps, anything
small enough to get into his mouth.
He ate roots. He ate newspaper.
Brett Wilkins | Israel Waging ‘Deliberate Campaign of Starvation’ in Gaza, reports Amnesty International
Israel “is carrying out a deliberate campaign of starvation in the occupied Gaza Strip, systematically destroying the health, well-being, and social fabric of Palestinian life,” Amnesty said.
“Walking in Beauty”: Closing Prayer from the Navajo Blessing Way Ceremony
In old age wandering on a trail of beauty, living again, may I walk.
James Crews: Losing Heart | Poem and reflection
You might be
driving to work one stormy morning,
scowling at every car that passes you
when it happens again—that sudden
leap in the chest as you see the rain
