Tony Gloeggler: This Kind of Room
I don’t
want to be back in love with Erica, driving
to some quaint upstate town, windows
down, in complete control of the tape deck
and we’re both singing along as loud
and as off key as we please
Alfred McCoy: Did Mark Twain Imagine Donald Trump?
If Mark Twain were alive today, he would certainly have written a novel about Donald Trump. After all, his 1873 novel, The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today, distinctly caught a nineteenth-century version of our Trumpian moment, tariffs and all.
Laure-Anne Bosselaar: In Response to a Student Asking Where to Find Poetry During Difficult Times
In your friend’s voice. Or silence.
In all those years it takes for a barn to collapse.
In the terrified tenderness of a first kiss.
In a last kiss too.
Cynthia Kaufman: Jewish Safety and the Weaponization of Antisemitism
The conflation of criticisms of Israel with antisemitism makes Jews less safe.
Baruch November: After Bracha
A blessing for just being able
to arise in early pink-blue light.
A blessing for when lightning veins
a cloud or strikes the oak into flames.
A blessing for when the earth quakes
Vegan Kitchen: Homemade Chocolate Ice Cream
This chocolate banana ice cream is delicious, healthy, and the perfect way to satisfy a sweet tooth. It has no dairy or refined sugar, and it’s super easy to make.
Barbara Crooker: Two Poems for Summer
And tomorrow, another hot one,
and that sweet juicy sun
will pop up again, staining
the horizon red, orange, gold.
Octavia E. Butler: Kindness eases change / Love quiets fear
In order to rise from its own ashes, a Phoenix first must burn.
Byron Hoot: The Mind in the Wind Seeing Where Things Lie
What I need are nights
of deep sleep; this riding the wind is not as easy
as it would seem to be.
Abby Zimet: The Shambolic Grifter In the Arena, Daring Greatly
As King Cheeto lies, scams, babbles and scurries to escape the furor over his pedophile bestie, some fierce unlikely heroes have emerged to call bullshit.
Kristofer Collins: Pineapple Eddie (three poems)
This is not the color
if justice is what we expect. I feel
God’s thumb pushing down our heads
like dull tacks into this offended earth.
William Trowbridge: Polio Days
July of 1949 was especially hot in Omaha, but the polio epidemic got most of the news coverage. Across the country, hospitals were filling up.
Roberta Hatcher: Early Days
Into the sudden quiet—
riotous flowers and birds,
wildlife in streets and backyards.
Had they always been there,
hidden behind our busyness
and the noise of our machines?
Carter Dillard, Zahara Nabakooza: How Nations Are Built on the Backs of Disenfranchised Children
True justice begins at birth, not in systems that mask inequality with the language of freedom and hide civil erasure behind institutional power.
