Barbara Crooker: Nearing Menopause, I Run Into Elvis At Shoprite,
The bass
line thumps and grinds, the honky tonk piano moves like an ivory
river, full of swampy delta blues.
Kim Ports Parsons: May the Particles of My Body Travel the Endless Conduits
When I die, lay me in the loam under the big oak
on the path through the woods, deep down in the endless
flow of talk among the trees there…
Audio: Jack Gilbert reads his poems
Reading poems from The Great Fires, some of them in earlier versions, Jack Gilbert looks back on the loves and solitudes of a life lived acutely, seen in terms of the Pittsburgh steel mills where he worked as a youth
Sally Bliumis-Dunn: Purple Carrot
These are lonely times.
No sweetness lingers on the tongue
from this carrot’s purple flesh.
Video: Animal Protein vs. Plant-Based Protein
Dr. Michael Greger discusses a public health case for modernizing the definition of protein quality.
Paul Laurence Dunbar: Religion
I am no priest of crooks nor creeds,
For human wants and human needs
Are more to me than prophets’ deeds
Paul Christensen: The Ice Man Cometh
Vermont has gone into deep storage, buried under a foot of sticky snow, with drifts reaching up to a few feet in some places. The silence is as pure as a church on Saturday.
Abby Zimet: Acts That Defy Humanity
The arrests offer little solace to friends and family grieving for a kind, joyful, “good human,” “quirky and true to himself,” “good spirit and soul” who attended church youth group and worked to be a good dad.
David Kirby: Taking it home to Jerome
Everything else was to come, everything about love:
the sadness of it, knowing it can’t last, that all lives must end,
all hearts are broken.
Rashad Shabazz: Black police officers aren’t colorblind – they’re infected by the same anti-Black bias as American society and police in general
Policing in the U.S. has, from its inception, treated Black people as domestic enemies.
Video/Audio: ‘Imbolc/Vision’ a film poem by Grace Wells
Imbolc marks the beginning of spring, and for Christians it is the feast day of Saint Brigid, Ireland’s matron saint.
Karen J. Greenburg: The Real Failure of January 6th
How America’s Insurrectionists Crossed the Rubicon of History
Mel Packer: The Bend on the River Road from Homestead
A falling down, bullet-pocked sheet metal wall
Once erected to mark the edges of the
South Side Jones and Laughlin steel mill
Chris Wright: The Inspiring Outrage of Norman Finkelstein
Wokeness is what happens when the destruction of the labor movement proceeds so far, and social atomization becomes so all-consuming, that even the “left” adopts an individualistic, moralistic, psychologistic, censorious, self-righteous, performative approach to making social change.
