Abby Zimet: John Prine as Tender Poet
“If his songs were allowed to exist in the world—so simply written, so profoundly beautiful —surely there was room for other good, decent things, too.”
Michael Simms: Bus
One afternoon at a bus stop in Ruston, Louisiana we picked up a single passenger, a huge man in a dirty plaid shirt, grease-stained khakis, and unlaced boots covered in mud.
Ari Honarvar: When Savoring a Pleasant Moment is a Radical Act
And then someone from another rooftop shouted a verse of Rumi’s poetry into the clear night air.
James Wright: Trying to Pray
This time, I have left my body behind me, crying
In its dark thorns.
Philip Terman: On the Way to Get Chicken Wings We Listen to a Podcast About a Somalian Struggling to Come to America
Most of the others have turned themselves in.
But Abdi is in the basement with his brother.
Michelle Bitting: Ode to Sex with You
lips two wild pulsing fish
swift bubbles of nothing
moaned into the air’s
naked ear
David Adès: Premonitions of Catastrophe
This was not the burning of witches or heretics
but the burning of a continent
Adrie Kusserow: Fontanelegy
I felt the manic bird
of her heartbeat flutter into my throat,
her unfinished nerves sparking and misfiring,
the tiny wings of her blood rushing in and out.
Video: Gail Langstroth | firegarden / jardín-de-fuego
About this short film, Gail Langstroth writes: One hot, summer afternoon in New York City, the poet Anne Marie Macari and I met at the Bouchon Café, Time Warner Center, … Continue reading
Video: Revolution
Revolution is comprised of 7 vignettes where individuals talk, discuss how being Black has impacted them and what the word revolution means to them.
Aileen Cassinetto: There are no kings in America
There are no kings in America.
Only gilded men we can topple
again and again.
Video: Liberty
Issues of politics, gentrification, community and epistemology subtly collide in Humes’s evocative and assured short film, Liberty, which has won awards at Berlin, SXSW and the Miami Film Festival.
Paul Laurence Dunbar: Sympathy
I know why the caged bird beats his wing
Till its blood is red on the cruel bars;
For he must fly back to his perch and cling…
Gerry LaFemina: Hive Mind
We’ve been talking about the muse up until this point, today—how I don’t believe in such a thing. This stings their sensibilities. The bee in the classroom is a happy distraction.
