H.C. Palmer: An Old Kansas Farm Boy’s Take on Gary Snyder’s “Hay for the Horses” or Why I Became a Poet
In the early 1950s I worked summers as a part of a team of 4 high school football players bucking bales of alfalfa hay for a local rancher in Southeast Kansas. We moved over 1,000 bales from his hay meadow to the loft in his barn each cutting.
Sydney Lea: Remorse
Do you ever recall some minor misdemeanor or even one you committed only in mind, and –however absurdly– half believe it contributed to a disaster?
Mattea Kramer: After Loneliness
Left for Dead in Donald Trump’s America, Communal Life Stirs
Robert Lipsyte: The Barbarians at the Gate
I was shocked, but not surprised. What do we do now? Yes, we all knew they were coming, still….
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.
