Claude McKay: December, 1919
‘Tis ten years since you died, mother,
Just ten dark years of pain,
And oh, I only wish that I
Could weep just once again.
Elizabeth Drew Barstow Stoddard: Nameless Pain
I should be happy with my lot:
A wife and mother – is it not
Enough for me to be content?
What other blessing could be sent?
Greg Lobas: Her Animal Self (corrected version)
hit the brakes so hard it almost sent her back in time. A minute would do. Even a few seconds, just before the van rocketed over the rise, launched into … Continue reading
Greg Lobas: Her Animal Self
Hanging by a shred of flesh
next to the silky, glistening club of her ankle joint,
is a dangling puppet of a foot without the strings.
Andrea Mazzarino: The Army We Don’t See
In 2019, there were 50% more contractors than troops in the U.S. Central Command region that includes Afghanistan, Iraq, and 18 other countries in the Middle East, as well as Central and South Asia.
Mike Vargo: AI and the Quantification of Everything
As someone who in fact aced the SAT and similar tests — but who then goofed off probably more than he should’ve at a fine university, and who in adult life has displayed episodes of colossal stupidity — I would not trust any attempt to put a number on a person’s intelligence.
Barbara Hamby: Ode to American English
no one uses
the King James anymore, only plain-speak versions,
in which Jesus, raising Lazarus from the dead, says,
“Dude, wake up,” and the L-man bolts up like a B-movie
mummy. “Whoa, I was toasted.”
Baron Wormser: The Holy War
What resides within Christianity… is the God-person whose life and times were radical and disruptive.
Michael Simms: Orpheus in Hollywood
Michael Chabon hasn’t so much straddled genres as rejuvenated whatever he touches, making literary fiction more engaging and accessible and popular genres less cliched and formulaic.
Etheridge Knight: Hard Rock Returns to Prison from the Hospital for the Criminal Insane
Hard Rock / was / “known not to take no shit
From nobody,” and he had the scars to prove it:
Susan Farrell: Why Kurt Vonnegut’s advice to college graduates still matters today
If Vonnegut was, like the students’ fathers, a family man and a veteran, perhaps he also embodied the dad that students in 1969 dreamed their own fathers could be: funny, artistic, anti-establishment and anti-war.
Jose Padua: These Rhymes Out to All the Nations
every day we stay alive is a reminder
that the universe is a thing of great natural beauty
Aric Sleeper: How a Tribal Rights Lawyer Is Winning Back the Rights of Nature
Attorney Frank Bibeau found a way to legally protect nature by suing the state of Minnesota in the name of manoomin, or wild rice, sacred to the Ojibwe people.
Carolyn Miller: Sunset on the 38 Geary
Each face staring straight ahead, no one speaking,
each rider holding the day carefully, like an egg,
past the piroshki bakeries, past the restaurants
selling pho and bulgoki and Shanghai dumplings
and carnitas, past the Church of the Star of the Sea
