Langston Hughes: Let America Be America Again
Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.
(America never was America to me.)
Bill Knott: Our Farewells Lack the Plausibility of our Departures (Three paintings)
Bill Knott ((1940 – 2014) was an American poet and artist known for his wild originality.
Ron Koertge: An Old Farmer
still has a few cows and goats he helped into this world, then fed with a bottle. They follow him everywhere, eyes rolled up in adoration.
Barbara Crooker: Economics 101
What if the GDP was really made up of birdsong,
the limitless arithmetic of joy?
Randy Minnich: Of Moths and Men
As oceans warm and creatures die,
the billionaires from glassed-in offices demand
Drill, Baby, Drill.
The world is upside down.
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer: The One Great Story
we might find we are held
by strands of birdsong, by the even beat
of eagle’s wings, by the blue moonlight
that reflects off the snow.
Brad Peacock: Pride (Two Poems)
You can scrub letters from websites
You can take away our healthcare
You can do your best to strip away our humanity
We will not be erased
Miriam Levine: Ego Is Not Your Amigo: Cop to It, Mim
You love the language of Twelve Step meetings—
don’t drink even if your ass falls off,
shitty committee, issues in the tissues,
attitude of gratitude, stinkin thinkin, dry drunk
Louise Bogan: Song For The Last Act
Now that I have your face by heart, I look
Less at its features than its darkening frame
Where quince and melon, yellow as young flame,
Lie with quilled dahlias and the shepherd’s crook.
Robert Okaji: Four Poems
The nine lesions
in my brain have not yet diminished language
receptors. Nor my imagination. But
how will I know when it happens?
Sister Lou Ella Hickman: Two Poems
earth will have her own way with hunger
green springing up devouring light
roots singing down into darkness
Joshua McKinney: World Enough
Someone is making a motion
to make a motion on a previous
motion, concerning the minutes
from the last meeting…
Julia B. Levine: Driving South on I-5 in Spring
How every vanishing enters me
like a bomb not yet tripped, but ready to go.
Most of all, I want to believe I can keep you alive.
Terry Blackhawk: A Springfield Ghazal
My grandfather “witnessed a lynching” my father recalled,
but “expressed no shame” about what he’d seen in Springfield.
“Only a boy,” my mother maintained, when my father
began to tell about his father that night in Springfield.
