Doug Anderson: The Fierce Economy of Eros
In creative writing classes I often have students do an exercise where they write the most down and dirty sex scene they can. I tell them that I won’t look … Continue reading
Michele Seminara: Engraft
Originally posted on The Blue Hour:
A Sudden Absence When a sudden absence opens where before there was a lover, or a child, (a child’s worse, we must all agree…
Peter Blair: Off the Road
One February dawn, a laundry bag over my shoulder, weighed down with clothes, tablets, the Bhagavad-Gita, On the Road, I hitch-hike the Edgewood ramp of the Parkway West, join the … Continue reading
Jose Padua: A poem in which chocolate is a metaphor for the great power hidden inside us
When my daughter asks why we are eating chocolate when we’re supposed to be eating just healthy food now that we’re on diets I explain to her that chocolate contains … Continue reading
Peter Blair: Between Me and the Light
Through the transverse slats of a blind, a window screen’s fine-woven steel net is lit by a star, no, only a tiny hole in the mesh against the pale rose … Continue reading
Jim Stewart: Birthing a Day
Originally posted on The Blue Hour:
You can hear the ocean early in the morning from here, this house hunkered on the hill, the back side of Soledad Mountain. Mexico…
Jose Padua: Socialism
In the town of Front Royal where I live I am a socialist. I live there with my socialist wife and my socialist daughter and my socialist son. We think … Continue reading
Wendell Berry: The Contrariness of the Mad Farmer
From Wendell Berry: Poet and Prophet, an interview by Bill Moyers. http://
Doug Anderson: A Spiritual Practice
The word “spiritual” is problematic and yet we use it as a place holder for those things as yet untouched by metaphysics, and I dare say untouchable, or those things … Continue reading
Lewis Turco: Thoughts from the Boston Post Road
[ed. note: I often like to read the early work of an established poet in order to see where he or she started. This poem about automobile pollution was written … Continue reading
John Samuel Tieman: For my Nam buddies
this isn’t a poem about manly battlefields and the many dead it’s a modern sonnet about traffic jams and medical exams and my eyes dilated and my novel a block … Continue reading
Naomi Shihab Nye: Blood
“A true Arab knows how to catch a fly in his hands,” my father would say. And he’d prove it, cupping the buzzer instantly while the host with the swatter … Continue reading
Peter Blair: Portrait in Plate Glass
Dim in each angle, not much of me stares back. A lot of light gets through into the store’s dark interior. What did Virgil call it: a shade? “You are … Continue reading
Doug Anderson: Confessions of a Believer
My friend who hates God so much he doesn’t want him to exist really hates the pimping pastors and the Inquisitorial popes but I don’t argue with him. Atheists have … Continue reading
