Allen Ginsberg: A Supermarket in California
What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking at the full moon.
Frida Berrigan: The Art of the Submarine
Each of those future billion-dollar behemoths could menace the world with the equivalent of 5,824 Hiroshimas.
Lex Runciman: Two Poems for Two Poets
Madeline, mother of poems, bright flowers
This day wild on your desk, bless you your sky
That does not let go. Your St. Ursula of bilocation
And irony, bless us here and bless us again there.
Brett Wilkins: UN to Warn Half a Million Gazans Facing ‘Catastrophic’ Food Insecurity
“The international community must apply relentless pressure to achieve a cease-fire and ensure sustained humanitarian access now,” said one advocate.
Naomi Shihab Nye: Before I Was A Gazan
I was a boy
and my homework was missing,
paper with numbers on it,
stacked and lined
Georgia Jensen: Two Years After Dobbs, the Fight Goes On
The reproductive rights landscape is bleak, but there are still ways to fight for abortion access.
Matthew Carey Salyer: Carrier
Catholicschoolboys
fret as I once did like dappled stones
in their own fists. Scuffed wingtips. My ilk.
John Feffer: You Think Trump Is Bad?
Recent elections have elevated far-right parties all over the world. And the worst is perhaps yet to come.
Laure-Anne Bosselaar: Widow’s Bedroom
Light puddles over the old floor planks, then climbs
the wall behind his place in our bed, & glows there.
Past noon, slow shadows douse that light & push it
out of the room. As if they knew he won’t come back.
Baron Wormser: Greening
The contest between Trump and Biden represents an allegory come to life of the two forms of consciousness: one candidate who espouses a derisive and divisive let-it-rip individualism that is indifferent to, among other things, truth, and one candidate who has spent a lifetime ministering to the needs of the Corporate State.
Barbara Hamby: How to Pray
Falling down on your knees is the easy part, like drinking
a glass of cold water on a hot day, the parched straw
of your throat flooded, your knees hitting the ground,
a prizefighter in the final rounds.
Video: Hair Tie, Egg, Homework Books
As a model student in her elementary school, 11-year-old Lin Yuqi is assigned to give a speech about her family at the Parent’s Meeting tonight. But after Lin finds out that she shares the same secret with a mischievous classmate, she starts to have second thoughts.
David Kirby: That Happened Sometimes
Frank’s grandmother
and great-grandmother would cook pounds
and pounds of pasta al pomodoro every week
and bring it to the Italian prisoners of war
at Camp Belle Mead, New Jersey.
Jason E. Ybarra: How Indigenous peoples are reclaiming their celebrations of the summer solstice − and using them to resist
In 1883, the U.S. government began a campaign to suppress the Sun dances, designating them as offenses for which penalties included imprisonment.
