Wally Swist: Honoring the Moment
The preparation is essential
to the beginning of the everyday
Mike Males: Why Conservative Parts of the U.S. Are So Angry
Republican America is poorer, more violent, and less healthy than Democratic America. But Republicans’ blame is misplaced.
Barbara Crooker: Star of Wonder, Star of Light
It’s Christmas, the year before the accident, when the earth
still seemed fixed. My husband and children are hanging
lights on the big pine tree
Sonali Kolhatkar: Abolishing the Nation’s Largest Jail System
L.A. County activists are working to replace violent jails with mental health facilities, and to reallocate funding from incarceration toward social services.
Lasse Söderberg: A part of America
They are watching us in their field glasses.
We are watching them in our field glasses.
Danusha Laméris: Thinking
Don’t you wish they would stop, all the thoughts
swirling around in your head, bees in a hive, dancers
tapping their way across the stage?
Paul Buchheit: The 50-Year Takeaway From Middle-Class America
We should be demanding the same benefits enjoyed by less wealthy but more progressive nations.
Dennis Patrick Slattery: Aging in Body, Eldering in Spirit
Our culture is hungry for voices of elders to share their wisdom with us, to counter the fierce energy of adolescent flames that insists on “my” and “me” to the exclusion of “us” and “we.”
Arlene Weiner: While I live
While I live, let me pour as through a sieve
the mixed and muddied waters of my loves,
hold the gold and let the silt go.
Video: Night Visit (Mature)
Ruthie spends an unusual night with a guy from her village. After discovering the troubling circumstances that led to their unexpected romantic encounter, she must seek the truth and find her own way to confront him. (Subtitled)
Michael Simms: The Pecan Grove
he taught me
the geometry of carpentry
the mysteries
of plumbing, told me
dirty jokes
Video: Nancy Isenberg – White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America
Marginalized as a class, white trash have always been at or near the center of major political debates over the American identity.
D.H. Lawrence: Terra Incognita
and grapes, and ghouls, and ghosts and green moonlight
and ruddy-orange limbs stirring the limbo
of the unknown air
Jane Braxton Little: Inferno
Climate Disaster Is Turning the Planet into a Tinderbox.
