Kurt Brown: High Diver
Now she pivots like a dancer, gripping the board
with her toes, and rises as it quivers with her weight
then settles again. She waits until it stops,
until she gathers herself up to balance there,
tall and undeniable, her back to us in the withering light.
Baron Wormser: If
If, as a poet suggested a long while ago, the center is not holding. If morality no longer has any practicable basis. If public statements are cant and platitude. If … Continue reading
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer: Doors Where I Have Knocked
Door of forgiveness that’s never locked.
Door of dreams. Door of god.
Door of contentment without a knob
that can only be entered with empty hands.
Dion O’Reilly: Subject C, the Numinous, and Ellen Bass’s ‘Gate C-22’
“…the pure pleasure of the numinous poem, which, in the final analysis, might contain our personal myths, successful in the way myths are successful, in their transmission of complexity, magic, and the paradoxes of this painfully-beautiful world.”
Sean Sexton: Herculaneum (audio and painting email to Robert Cording)
I’m reading Basho’s “Backroads to the North Country,” on my trip, an old, crumbling Penguin classics series that includes four separate journeys and a great intro. He conveys at one point how grateful he is to be on the road, Mt Fuji far away back home in Edo, so he needn’t ponder it in his life for awhile.
Hayden Saunier: The Spin
My washing machine won’t operate
without the matte black hardcover
American Heritage Dictionary, Fifth Edition,
placed atop its lid. I no longer question this.
Gary Fincke: Schmaltz
My mother
Said we could shimmy it off in no time,
Doing the Twist and the Mashed Potato,
The dances of the slim who’d never heard
Of real schmaltz and the terrible success
Of learning place
Betsy Sholl: Monet’s Garden
When he was painting his lilies,
when he was refusing evacuation
despite the war being close enough
to hear from his garden,
was Monet offering the world lilies,
saying there are lilies as well as guns?
Jordan Smith: These Days
The danger of elegy is that it just tells us what we already know: we lose and suffer and become the subject of the loss and suffering of others. Liam had no patience for what he called the “I fall upon the thorns of life, I bleed” school of poetry.
Jasleen Singh: The Trump Administration’s Campaign to Undermine the Next Election
The Trump administration is setting the stage for election subversion. This power play poses a grave threat to the future of U.S. election infrastructure. It is also, in many respects, illegal.
Charles Harper Webb: Bad Dog
Bad Dog licks killers’ bloody hands,
leaps with joy for rapists, fawns at politicians’
crooked feet. “He’s an awful judge
of character,” the owner tells kind-hearted
strangers who scuttle past
James Zogby: The Story of the Gaza Genocide Did Not Begin on October 7
When those who seek to help resolve a conflict are captive to one side’s definitions and perspective, it’s a recipe for continued tension and ultimately disaster.
Sally Bliumis-Dunn: Women’s Voices
…when Margaret Thatcher took voice-
lowering lessons, she was told
to speak as if she had a penis and a cold.
Sarah Beckerman: What fantasy stories teach us about defeating authoritarianism
More than offering an escape, fantasy worlds can also show what courage looks like when the odds are stacked against you.
