Audio: Gil Scott-Heron | Home Is Where the Hatred Is
Home is where the needle marks
Try to heal my broken heart
Emily Dickinson: She dealt her pretty words like Blades
She dealt her pretty words like Blades–
How glittering they shone—
And every One unbared a Nerve
Or wantoned with a Bone—
Matthew Redmond: Emily Dickinson is the unlikely hero of our time
As the world continues to endure the ravages of COVID-19, another ghost of Dickinson steps into view.
David Ades: Extracts from a Liar’s Notebook
If you tell the lie, tell it slant
but with a direct gaze, with utter conviction…
Ellery Akers: Rachel Carson
I think of the way she knew
that eels slid from brook to brook
and then to the sea.
Robert Walicki: Two Poems
I’m stumbling out of the dark and back down again,
winding out of the rutted valleys of the Mon,
ass crack of the world and broken roads…
Barbara Huntington: What to Do with Nine Twelfths
At the time it seemed a good idea
Dividing his ashes
Liz Moran: (Harper’s Bazaar)
I watched her for ten long minutes
in Barnes & Noble.
Emily Dickinson: For each ecstatic instant
For each ecstatic instant
We must an anguish pay
Doug Anderson: Tucson, 1964
I’d been up all night with a broken heart and saw him.
Skull deformed, one eye larger than the other.
Then back in his truck and gone before the rest of us were up.
Sandra McPherson: What Should We Anticipate?
I’m packing enough
for the impending flea market
David Fenza: For Liam was Many
For he was so curious about the shapes & pressures
of our American lives, he made each friend
feel like the genius-author of a great story.
Rachel Hadas: Poets and novelists have been writing about life under COVID-19 for more than a century
Good artists seem, in our alarming and prolonged time […] to be leaping over months, decades and centuries, to speak directly to us now.
S.B. Merrow: Craving
I’m talking about a night we spend
in the same body on the same smooth stones
on the bottom of the dry river
when a storm comes.
