Katie Kapurch: Why ‘Barbie’ and ‘The Little Mermaid’ made 2023 the dead girl summer
These dead girls offer insights about living. Embracing death’s inevitability brings some freedom, as well as access to truths about time and the natural world.
Michael T. Young: How to Survive the End of the World
these strangers random as bits of sea glass
collected and admired
George Yancy and H.A. Nethery Discuss White Supremacy and “White Innocence”
A conversation in response to the murder of three Black people in Jacksonville, Florida by a white supremacist
Sandy Solomon: Casual Labor
The man at the front door wants work,
any job. Hand on the knob, I start
to turn him down, to swing the door’s weight
to, but then I consider my mother’s mother.
Kai Coggin: Essence
and did you know these tiny sprouts
these little leaves and baby greens
already hold the heavy flavors of their final selves?
Video: Soft Animals by Renee Zhan
In this wildly imaginative surrealistic narrative, two ex-lovers cross paths at a train station.
George Drew: Federico García Lorca, You Have Ruined My Day
this, in the end, might as well have been a poem about savage reckonings
Claude McKay: Harlem Shadows
Ah, little dark girls who in slippered feet
Go prowling through the night from street to street!
Julia Conley: ‘Climate Breakdown Has Begun.’ Summer 2023 Hottest on Record
Climate scientists across the world have been alarmed over the past three months by fast-spreading wildfires, prolonged and deadly heatwaves, and numerous shattered heat records across the northern hemisphere.
Tony Gloeggler: September
I am fulfilling my one holy
purpose helping to make this guy
happy.
Naomi Shihab Nye: Little Farmer
how right he was about slowness,
the path of sunlight through leaves,
how dirt has always befriended me,
Rachel Hadas: Rainbow Parfait
…to be the archaeologist of one’s own past,
as if the sleeper, wakened now, alert,
was perched at the top of a trench
peering at something shining down below
Doug Anderson: Underneath the sequined day there are tunnels
We enter them in sleep, hang our masks
on a hook and our names are erased.
Michael Simms: Tootling Along
I hope you don’t mind my sharing links to my own recent publications.
