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?
Andy Young: Ash Wednesday 2020
Sitges, Catalunya We slept to the clatter of the sea and rose to search for the weeping drag queens displaying their mourningbehind the king’s erect effigy paraded to the sea … Continue reading
Traci Brimhall: Museum of Fire
On the first story my son and I make the history of fire,
on the second he wants to make where we are, the slow
smolder of Kansas
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.
Patrick Henry: How Dorothy Day found her calling while fighting the 1918 flu pandemic
Dorothy Day’s nine months as a nurse at the height of a pandemic that killed 50 million people, deepened her commitment to the poor, homeless and abandoned.
Nneka M. Okona: The Imposition of Black Grief
For Black people in the United States, grief and loss are intertwined with our very being. Our ancestors knew the trauma of loss intimately…
Michael Simms: The Ruins
the air full
of transparent wings,
the fox crossing
the innocent road
full of weeds
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.
Rachel Hadas: Ides of March MMXX
But who
could hear me through my mask?
Don’t ask.
Love
wears a glove.
Rachel Hadas: ‘Laugh right in its face’ – a poet reflects on her craft’s defiant role in the middle of a war
Poets write poetry to help them come to terms with the terror of their times. The process of writing those poems, and the process of reading them, both offer respite.
Derrick Z. Jackson: Nearly One Million US Deaths from COVID-19 | The Grim Consequences of Sidelining Science
One million US deaths from COVID-19. Catatonic politics on climate change. Communities suffocating from environmental injustice. All these issues are tragically linked by the hardening divisions in the United States … Continue reading
Rachel Hadas: February 29, 2020
That extra day, that ordinary day,
I got where I was going on the train
and taught the lyric leap, as per the plan;
then, tired, happy, bathed in poetry,
caught a train and travelled back again
Patricia Jabbeh Wesley: News
our people who do the hard work
of America,
dying as caregivers
Danielle DeTiberus: In the Middle of Fucking You, I Pause
Twenty years together and yet
You were new to me again.
