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.
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.
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
Mel Leonor Barclay and Shefali Luthra: ICE puts pregnant immigrants and their babies at risk
Fear of deportation is deterring people without permanent legal status from critical care. Doctors are worried for their health — and the health of their pregnancies.
Brad Davis: On the Way to Putnam
in late summer’s
westering light,
his yellow cornfields and,
toward the middle,
that lone, misshapen tree
Nick Turse: On the Precipice of Authoritarian Rule
The Trump Administration’s Military Occupation of America
Susan Kelly-DeWitt: Sunrise at the River
The light steps forth out of the heatand darkness, out of the stillnessand ghost-lit world while I feel the dead staring downat me from some other shoreas if I was … Continue reading
Emma Grover: Finding Sappho | Four translations in conversation
In this article, I review four translations of Sappho produced over the past six decades.
James Wright: Sappho
Fire does not rest on iron, it drifts like a blue blossom
And catches on my breath;
Coiling, spinning, the blue foam of the gas fire
Writhes like a naked girl
Video: Jane Goodall Asks What Separates Us From Chimpanzees?
Jane Goodall says the only real difference between humans and chimps is our sophisticated language. She urges us to start using it to change the world.
Joseph Bathanti: Maz’s Homer
Sister Ann Francis, my teacher, whom I do not like at all, though she will not prove the worst of them, slips us word that Sister Geralda, the ferocious school principal, who teaches eighth grade, has granted amnesty for the last ten minutes of the school day. We are to hurry home to witness the climax of the World Series.
Molly Fisk: The Northeast Edge of Normal
parents of children
I’ll never meet are gone into the open
arms of the sky and the sea and their
sons and daughters with them how
can this happen again
Abby Zimet: Hezbollah and MS-13 ‘R Us, Naked On Bikes In Frog Ears
Despite court losses, public antipathy, ridicule, a shutdown they ignore, the nascent police state lurches on with its daft apocalyptic narrative of an America in flames.
Thomas Lux: And Still It Comes
thudding and tearing like footsteps
of drunk gods or fathers; it comes
polite, loutish, assured, suave,
breathing through its mouth
