Robert Stewart: The Hole
The first time I took a turn on a jackhammer, on a sewer-repair crew, the foreman told me to strap steel toe guards onto my boots. My boots already had toes … Continue reading
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?
Thom Hartmann: Trump Is the Most Dangerous Criminal in US History
His most dangerous crime is not simply corruption or obstruction, nor even incitement of insurrection: It’s the deliberate attempted destruction of American democracy itself.
Patricia Spears Jones: Discontented Summer
Every picture tells a story but which story and who makes the picture
Vicky Bond: How Humans Get Sick From Other Animals
The growing emergence of diseases from animals suggests that we need to rethink our reliance on animals as a food source.
John Zheng | Valediction: Poems and Prose by Linda Parsons
Parsons’s contemplation moves from shaping garden beds to shaping life. Garden is an island of necessity where her “orbits in and out of the perennial beds” have shaped her life for thirty years.
Chelsea Cleveland: Loneliness as Fermentation
Just as foods undergo significant changes, evolving into something more intricate and nuanced, we, too, experience compelling transformations in our lives.
Carol Moldaw: Road Trip to Planned Parenthood
Only one hazmat-suited
protester outside the two-block buffer zone
shouldered a sign stapled to a plywood cross
that proclaimed a woman’s regret inevitable.
Grannies Respond/Abuelas Responden: Go Granny Go!
Elisa visited a Dallas boys’ migrant detention facility. “This hit me. This could have been my father. It was like a prison. The kids were depressed. Some were suicidal. It was heartbreaking.”
John Okrent: This Costly Season
I picture Whitman,
wending his way through wounded Union
soldiers—his democratic nostrils, the smell of dead
or dying flesh. And in all the dooryards, the smell of lilacs.
Belle Chesler: Crisis in the Schools
A Return to a Normal That Was Never Good Enough
Rachel Hadas: What do the classics teach us about hope?
How do we weather this welter of bad news? How do we adapt?
Michael Simms: The Courage of Teachers
In 1987, students gathered in front of the admin building angry over the corruption of the university’s board. The crowd was getting ugly. I was a young teacher standing to the side, listening to the speeches, watching warily as the crowd grew. Someone shouted Take Over the Administration! and the crowd chanted Take Over! Take over! Take Over! The crowd, now a mob…
