Charles Davidson: Are We Prepared for the Knock on the Door?
Brutality has become ICE’s signature policy. Trump’s “barbed-wire” signature has dictated the ungodly means and ungodly ends of what rapidly has become the Trumpian version of the Nazi Gestapo and the Communist NKVD.
Ellen Bryant Voigt | At the Movie: Virginia, 1956
When finally we got our own TV, the evening news
with its hooded figures of the Ku Klux Klan
seemed like another movie
Mel Packer: We Must Lay Our Bodies Down
We must stand up against a tyrannical state power that is clearly moving toward fascism, or more and more of us will wake one day to find families and friends gone.
Matthew J. Parker: AI is Stupidity’s BFF
My real life encounters with AI, however, mostly on plagiarized student papers, have proven that when it comes to inventive and even fantastical falsehoods, today’s AI not only surpasses our current president, but is in fact unwittingly in league with him.
Audio: Adrienne Rich introduces and reads “What Kind of Times Are These”
the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows
near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted
who disappeared into those shadows
John Guzlowski: Fear
You could hear the fear in my mom’s voice. She feared everything, the sky in the morning, a drink of water, a sparrow singing in a dream, me whistling some stupid little Mickey Mouse Club tune I picked up on TV.
Abby Zimet: Pity the Nation/ Whose Shepherds Mislead Them
Amidst plunging polls and righteous rage at his Epstein Memorial Ballroom, the inept manchild faces growing resistance, sublime to ridiculous, to his nascent kingship.
Daniella Toosie-Watson: A Series of Small Miracles
Listen: in this poem, there are no men.
I give to myself & give again.
Kyle Schmidlin: Republicans Are Trying to Make Fascism Edgy and Hip
By declaring all opposition to themselves anti-fascism, MAGA isn’t leaving much mystery about their leanings.
Norman Solomon: How Corporate Democrats Led to the Trump Era
Corporate-friendly approaches by the Democratic Party set the stage for Trump’s faux “populism” as an imagined solution to the discontent that the corporatism of the Democrats had helped usher in.
Ma Yongbo: Your Voice
Your voice, echoing in the narrow and dark corridor,
continuously echoing, warm and bright,
as if beyond this ordinary dusk
there is no hunger, toil and separation in the world.
Julie L. Holcomb: 177 years ago, the Seneca Falls Convention kicked off the fight for women’s suffrage – an iconic moment deeply shaped by Quaker beliefs on gender and equality
Real change, Lucretia Mott believed, would require going to the root of the problem: “mindless tradition and savage greed.”
Dion O’Reilly: Post Anthropocene
Can we imagine such emptiness? Such quiet.
Every bit of us, gone: the jackal-mouthed
and gospel-wild, razor wire
keeping out the needful
of our kind, even the ruins of holy cities
Sydney Lea: Poor, Sad Soul
I’d seen that balding woman before, the one I watched as she transferred a few small sacks of groceries from her shopping cart to her Kia Soul, a car I considered too young for her.