Sydney Lea: Final Visit
He kept awkwardly laying a hand across his forehead, trying to cover his eyes. He’d done that a lot by then. Ever the iron-butt Yankee, he meant to hide his tears, though … Continue reading
William Palmer | The Glow Fills Something Inside: Lucille Clifton and Alma
among the rocks
at walnut grove
your silence drumming
in my bones,
tell me your names
Mike Vargo: Language Is a Virus
A punishment for the arrogance of thinking my mission in life was to explain things to people.
Desne A. Crossley: Alzheimer’s and Missing Love (2015-2017, 1996 & 1950)
Watched the movie Hidden Figures (when the first black women worked in the Nasa space program) and almost cried. My father was a rocket scientist, something I didn’t realize until his brain was already gone to Alzheimer’s.
Woody Lewis: Sally Hemings and the Road to Curdsville
I have memories of the apartheid signs on all the restaurants and public facilities. A white person who grew up in the area at that time recently corrected me: “Those weren’t apartheid signs, those were Jim Crow signs.”
Video: Inside, The Valley Sings
Trapped in the never-ending horror of solitary confinement, three prisoners in the United States seek comfort and escape in the boundless landscapes of their own imaginations.
Alexis Rhone Fancher: The Girl in the Photo
She’s been damaged. Life’s out of control; there are no good options. The girl in the photo wants to let go, to quit this life and choose another…
Jerome Bergland: The Dreaminations of Jianqing Zheng
Jianqing Zheng long ago established himself as one of the most thrilling and gifted writers of haibun and tanka prose.
James Crews: The Slightest Kindness
We were walking the icy streets,
talking about the ways our country
has betrayed us again—promises
unkept, laws broken beyond repair.
Sydney Lea: A Busy Life
I’m an old man now, and I do acknowledge a certain kind of pointlessness, namely my occasionally fervent striving to decode my life’s “meaning,” and even the world’s. In saner moments, I can actually consider the futility of such an endeavor a relief and a blessing.
DeWitt Henry: Forces of Nature | A Dream Retold
In my dream, the poor people, on the contrary, many of who are Korean, have lost everything, all of their children. They have had no warning.
Matthew J. Parker: Cruise Missile Policing | The Latest Drug War Hysteria of our Nannies in Chief
So, what’s to be done? Why, educate, of course, and stop running scared.
Sydney Lea: La Bella Vita
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
