H.G. Reza: Living While Brown in America
Walking through a Home Depot parking lot while being brown raises enough reasonable suspicion in an immigration agent’s mind to cause my detention for a citizenship check…
Charlotte Matthews: Fog Count at Fluvanna Women’s Correctional Center
…pregnant women are shackled even in labor. They are allowed to have their babies with them for one week, then they are taken away. Most will never see their children again
Frida Berrigan: Preparing for Scarcity
The truck wheel’s inner tube was right in front of me, no longer half-submerged in the pond’s late summer muck. After so many hot weeks without rain, the water had dried up and the garbage was completely exposed.
James Crews: Light and Dark
Half-awake, I lose myself in a pool
of late morning sun and leaf-shadows
flashing on the floor outside my bedroom,
what the Japanese call komorebi—light
and dark held in the same container
of a single moment, as we hold them in us,
John Guzlowski: Hope Is Our Mother
A question I get often about my Polish parents is what kept them going during the war and after the war.
Hend Salama Abu Helow: Olive Trees Tie Palestinians to Our Homeland. Israel Treats Them as a Threat
They feared the olive trees — the trees that know, more than anyone, who the true owners of this land are.
Charlotte Matthews: Draw With Your Eyes Closed
On Fridays, we drew animals with our eyes closed. Mrs. Plath said it could be anything we wanted. So, there we were: 25 six-year-olds bent over manila paper, crayons in stubby … Continue reading
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.
Sean Sexton: Herculaneum (audio and painting email to Robert Cording)
I’m reading Basho’s “Backroads to the North Country,” on my trip, an old, crumbling Penguin classics series that includes four separate journeys and a great intro. He conveys at one point how grateful he is to be on the road, Mt Fuji far away back home in Edo, so he needn’t ponder it in his life for awhile.
Jordan Smith: These Days
The danger of elegy is that it just tells us what we already know: we lose and suffer and become the subject of the loss and suffering of others. Liam had no patience for what he called the “I fall upon the thorns of life, I bleed” school of poetry.
William Trowbridge: Polio Days
July of 1949 was especially hot in Omaha, but the polio epidemic got most of the news coverage. Across the country, hospitals were filling up.
Matthew J. Parker: The Continuing Fallacy of Our Word Salad Sandwiches
I shot up heroin for 25 years and never had a problem. I shot up fentanyl once and it almost killed me.
