Baron Wormser: Groovy
It’s fair to say that “groovy” has passed out of daily parlance. As words go, it was a bit silly, a bit mystic, a bit glib, a bit droll, a bit low-brow, a bit artless, and a bit wonderful. It spoke to an era and seemed, accordingly, germane to that era and almost sensible in its glad frankness.
Video: She Sells Seashells
Archival footage meets contemporary black and white super 8, in a curious exploration of the female cockle gatherers of South Wales and the surprising secrets shellfish and seaweed hold for our oceans’ health.
Desne A. Crossley: A Wallflower and Her Mother
Clueless about west coast Whiteness, for sure. For my anxious mother, this meant I needed her singular brand of watchful encouragement to grow into a whole person, a whole woman—and to be taught some street smarts for life in suburban Palo Alto with its unfamiliar patterns and pitfalls.
Kim Stafford: Four Poems
Her text says the bombing is getting
closer. She dozes, there’s a blast, a rattle
of debris falling somewhere near. She says
every bomb makes an earthquake. Her heart
stops. She says the forces are getting closer.
Rebecca Gordon: How Will Your Data Be Deployed
In an Age of Dark Enlightenment?
Emilie Lygren: With and Without
Hunger ––
I can’t hear the word
without my mind swinging to Gaza.
Watson Institute, Brown University: US military aid to Israel
This report includes the $17.9 billion the U.S. government has approved for Israeli military operations in Gaza from 10/7/23 to 12/31/24.
Robert Cording: An Unasked for Inauguration Prayer, 2025
Lord of the light that reveals
how we have failed and failed again
the one requirement asked of us—
to love one another.
Elena Novak: 50 years after the Vietnam War, the legacy of nonviolent resistance lives on
At the 50th anniversary celebration of the end of the Vietnam War in Ho Chi Minh City, U.S. antiwar activists drew lessons for stopping the war on Gaza.
Don Krieger: Juneteenth at Carter-Howell-Strong Park in Tallahassee
Two-hundred forty years after America’s Independence Day: “… one in a thousand black men [in America] can expect to be killed by police.
Jessie Redmon Fauset: Nostalgia
Lonely log cabin
On the road to Notasulga,
Sighing and sagging and quaking;
Let me breathe to the heart of your walls
A secret—
Jessica Corbett: ‘The Hunger Games of Gaza’ | IDF Kills 70+ Palestinians Trying to Get Food Aid
“It was a massacre,” said one witness, adding that Israeli troops continued firing on people as they fled.
David Kirby: Two Poems
Let us be like my friend Rick’s grandma,
who Rick remembers trotting alongside the car as his dad
drove him and his brother down the long driveway from
her house, tapping on a window until one of the boys
rolled it down so she could ask, “Did you get enough pie?
Dawn Potter: Why, as the evening steps forward,
as the late noise of traffic, of shrill birdsong,
dies away, do I always recall
those brief summers, when the old folks
reclined in the grass on the hill
