Charles W. Brice: Stupidity
The guy in his MAGA cap
yells at my friend
that she’s a scaremonger
for wearing a mask
Adrian Blevins: Appalachians Run Amok
I’m impatient like you to get to the bottom of the problem
of what to call the vacant feeling of our long-ago deportation
from the goats & their creamy milk & the meadows & pastures
they would frolic in each Sunday when my father would
metaphorically herd them…
Video: Anne Lamott | 12 Truths I Learned from Life and Writing
If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.
Video: Sophie Scott | Why We Laugh
While exploring the neuroscience of speech and vocal behavior, Sophie Scott stumbled upon a surprising second vocation: making audiences laugh as a stand-up comic.
Abby Zimet: Heels not Heils
Hijacking the Proud Boys and MAGA Narrative Amidst Ruinous Reality.
Gerry LaFemina: A Room for Space Agers
At a certain age I re-aimed that telescope, first, to look into the window of the young widow across the street, she who made me feel atomic.
Sean Connolly: Sacrifice
You can’t educate a secret. Many defy time and live in the throats of birds chortling about the discovery of the universe, once and always hidden beyond sight.
Meg Pokrass: The Original Life of Bob
Bob’s ego sometimes got stuck and its nobody’s business where.
Peter Makuck: Two Poems
Every summer day was the last I thought,
even before my parents were gone
Sandy Solomon: Ghazal
A night of ghazals comes to an end to fill with birds.
As the sky blues, their calls braid in New Jersey.
Bart Plantenga: How the Soul Remains Miraculously Intact Despite 2000 Rejections
…we must learn to nest in piles of our own rejection slips and somehow effectively grab hold of the levers and buttons that control the means of writerly production…
Adrian Blevins: How I wrote The Brass Girl Brouhaha
I wrote The Brass Girl Brouhaha by tattooing the word WRONG across my heart to help me muster the strength I’d need to argue with a world that wanted me to say “hey, y’all!” in a hill-country accent sipping tea under a dogwood in a pink smock smattered with etchings of ivy.
Michael Simms: Oh God She Says
Oh God she says
The dog has learned to spell
José Alcantara: The National Association of Information Destruction
I bet you think I made that up,that this is some dystopian anti-elegy,
and that I am another Cassandra, bemoaning
a distant, inevitable future, but I saw it,
not ten minutes ago…
