Chanelle Gallant & Shannon Perez-Darby: Sex Trafficking Prosecutions Won’t Stop the Next Epstein. Here’s What Will.
We can fight child sexual abuse using a block-and-build strategy rooted in economic, racial, and gender justice.
Barbara Hamby: Ode to Untoward Dreams
Have you ever dreamt you had sex with someone
you aren’t remotely interested in,
like a guy you work with or one of your husband’s friends
Sharon Fagan McDermott: The Hat
That first day I noticed the handsome stranger, I was wearing a skirt and heels, walking delicately down the cracked sidewalks of Shady Avenue. This dressing-up for work was new to me.
Meg Pokrass: Three Poems
When I said, I miss America
I meant that what is nestled in my brain feels like a harbor.
Beth Copeland: Second Wife
Fifteen years ago I drove south to see you as trees broke
into bloom—redbuds, pears, dogwoods—and my heart
unfolded like a bud closed too long in the cold.
Dawn Potter: Don’t Tell Me You Don’t Know What Love Is
I think back to those nights in Buck Lane, the melodramas of sex and desire, the intense affections but also the cruelties … the ruthlessness of self-absorption.
Barbara Hamby: Ode to Hardware Stores
Where have all the hardware stores gone—dusty, sixty-watt
warrens with wood floors, cracked linoleum,
poured concrete painted blood red?
Sally Bliumis-Dunn: That Night
like a cage lit by moon in a darkness held at bay
beyond this room where the loud chandelier
lit us as though on a stage where we act our rawest selves
Beth Copeland: Pyre
Enough wood for a bonfire, I say, recalling the night
we torched a dead Christmas tree, drinking white wine and dancing
around the leaping blaze and the dark morning I burned your love
letters in a metal trash can outside, drunk and weeping, liar! liar!
David Kirby: Sex and Candy
Candy is to children what sex is to us, because when
you were a child, candy is what you thought about every
waking moment.
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.
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.
Cesare Pavese: Ancestors
I found out I had lived, before I was born,
in hard, sturdy, independent men, their own masters.
None of them knew what to say, so they just kept quiet.
Alice Friman: The Nick Poems
Do you know what you’re doing?
and she said yes
though deep in her virginity
she knew nothing
but what she wanted
