Laure-Anne Bosselaar: Arroyo Burro Beach
Look at me, writing circles around what I must face:
The man I love is dead.
Vincent Van Gogh: Art and Soul
A great fire burns within me, but no one stops to warm themselves at it, and passers-by only see a wisp of smoke.
Donald Trump: MAGA Sonnets
…you’re lucky I’m your president.
You’re so lucky. You’re so lucky, I always tell our great
First Lady, Darling, you’re so lucky.
Emily Dickinson: The Soul selects her own Society
The Soul selects her own Society —
Then — shuts the Door —
Neil Shepard: Seagull in a Bowl
Where gulls scavenge and float above the arcade,
Where waves break against the risings and pilings,
And the ring-toss winner sets off the dinging bell
And the girl laughs as the boy hands her a souvenir
Rita Sims Quillen: Taste and Other Mysteries
little oily sardines to lay on saltines
which he would make disappear
into the smile under his moustache
Ed Bieber: Cleverness
Nature is the master here: boundless, unpredictable,
full of astonishments. The children come next. I follow.
Molly Fisk: Native Landscape
Back then, the new growth on redwoods was the brightest
green and tasted of citrus, a good vitamin source if you were lost
in the woods, which I wasn’t, I was pure found girl skipping…
Mike Schneider: Bob Dylan’s Ballads of Murder, Drowning & Other Songs of Love
If one of the defining tendencies of post-modernism is breaking down borders between high and low culture—such as between Beethoven and Elvis, Dylan is a supreme post-modernist. The cultural compass inscribed by his work is huge, flattering us by the depth of his learning and song awareness. We can follow or not—the songs don’t care.
Charles W. Brice: Stupidity
The guy in his MAGA cap
yells at my friend
that she’s a scaremonger
for wearing a mask
Dear Vox Populi subscribers,
At 7pm tonight the official launch of American Ash, my new collection of poems published by Ragged Sky, is happening. I’ll be reading with two wonderful poets — Joan Bauer and Richard St. John.
Edgar Lee Masters: The Circuit Judge
I in life was the Circuit Judge, a maker of notches,
Deciding cases on the points the lawyers scored,
Not on the right of the matter.
Jason Irwin: Their Hands
All I remember were their hands holding me down: my mother’s father’s, a young nurse who gripped my left arm, and the doctor, who, before each prick into my skin, assured me it wasn’t a needle, just his finger.
Rachel Hadas:’What goes around comes around,’ or what Greek mythology says about Donald Trump
When I studied and taught Sophocles’ tragedy “Oedipus the King,” the stress was on hubris, irony, blindness. What wasn’t emphasized is that the play was written during and is set in the midst of a plague.
