Traditional Poems from Pre-Modern South India
It was the very first night,
and the young girl showed surprising skill
in the arts of love
Mike Vargo: The Holiday Rant
Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s Eve celebrate the three great indulgences of our culture: overeating, overspending, and getting overly intoxicated. The unifying theme is excess.
Rachel Hadas: 460 Riverside Drive
What ghostly messenger
was rattling away unseen
on the other side of the door?
Barbara Hamby: Mambo Cadillac
I’m talking to you, Mr. Magoo. Sit up, check
out that blonde with the leopard print tattoo. O she’ll lick
the sugar right off your doughnut and bill you, too, speak
French while she do the do.
Matthew J. Parker: Ban All Books But Mine
Ron DeSantis is doing a Model Press Conference with Florida high schoolers at P.S. 47, aka Our Lady of Stand Your Ground Middle School in Panacea.
Video: Soft Animals by Renee Zhan
In this wildly imaginative surrealistic narrative, two ex-lovers cross paths at a train station.
George Drew: Federico García Lorca, You Have Ruined My Day
this, in the end, might as well have been a poem about savage reckonings
Barbara Hamby: New Orleans Dithyramb
And Satan said unto the Lord, “You have your work
and I have mine, but there is no sin the world
cannot hold,” and the Lord, he laughed himself a big one
Chard deNiord: Turning 70
I know at last how to smile and not smile
at the same time in a way without trying that says,
“I’ve tasted ambrosia and mustard in the same bite
so many times my tongue’s lost its taste.
Barbara Hamby: Ode to My 1977 Toyota
Engine like a Singer sewing machine, where have you
not carried me—to dance class, grocery shopping,
into the heart of darkness and back again?
Yesterday’s Tomorrow: Street Art in Pittsburgh
Although Pittsburgh is home to a number of major museums and art galleries, the region’s streets often tempt residents to create their own art.
Kathy Fish: Collective Nouns for Humans in the Wild
Humans in the wild, gathered and feeling good, previously an exhilaration, now: a target.
Abby Zimet: Big Tough Weird LGBTQ-Bashing American Psycho Guy Wants Your Vote and What Could Go Wrong?
Whew. Latest proof the GOP is truly a malignant flaming clown car.
Barbara Hamby: Ode to Barbecue
We are lost again in the middle of redneck nowhere,
which is a hundred times scarier
than any other nowhere because everyone has guns.
