Jose Padua: Legends and the Way We Used to Live
When I was young they told me the legend of the spontaneously combusting hogs. How they’d burst into flames and become roast pork right in the middle of the road, … Continue reading
Jose Padua: In the Season of Blue Afternoons and Starry Starry Nights
. It’s 1979 and I’m just out of college and loving the landscape doing the only kind of traveling I can afford when the Greyhound bus stops along the highway … Continue reading
Philip Terman: The Frackin’ Poem
Scarlet tanagers, thrushes, warblers, hawks, spotted salamanders, skunk and possum, all the invisible insects— . the native shrubs, the wild flowers, all the trees cut down, the altered light patterns, … Continue reading
Jose Padua: Watching Television with my Mother
Watching television with my Mom sometimes it was professional wrestling and she’d go one two THREE whenever the bad guy heel got pinned by the babyface hero. She always liked … Continue reading
Elizabeth Gargano: The Dream Visit
. When I walk into the living room, my mother’s fake oriental rug gleams like spilled wine, its long-necked birds and spiky flowers following their untraceable paths. . My dead … Continue reading
Jose Padua: And When Lilacs Bloom There Will Be Time Enough for Both Anger and Light
After dinner one evening my daughter asks, “What if I grow up to have anger issues?” It feels like a summer night with the warm weather newly arrived and it’s … Continue reading
Doug Anderson: Waltz Me Deeper
I seem to be arriving at a goal I had not aspired to. The distance between my writing and my being in the world is lessening. My speaking voice is … Continue reading
Jose Padua: The Monkey Time
It was a minor soul ballad, though not quite a ballad, or not a ballad at all, that brought Billy the Kid back to life in a dive bar downtown. … Continue reading
Toni Morrison: Nobel Prize 1993 Acceptance Speech (Text and Video)
“Once upon a time there was an old woman. Blind but wise.” Or was it an old man? A guru, perhaps. Or a griot soothing restless children. I have heard … Continue reading
T. S. Eliot: The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
S’io credesse che mia risposta fosse A persona che mai tornasse al mondo, Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse. Ma perciocche giammai di questo fondo Non torno vivo alcun, s’i’odo … Continue reading
Jose Padua: A Book of Lines and Years
I give to you a book of days, you give to me a line of minutes. I give to you a story of weeks, you give to me a poem … Continue reading
Doug Anderson: Scattering my Mother’s Ashes on the Family Plot at Hickman Kentucky
. Down into the black, flesh curdled dirt. Down into the family charnel, marinade in whiskey, with the murderers and soul murderers against whom you honed your tongue. Down there … Continue reading
Video: Tilda Swinton reads Rumi’s poem “Like This”
Tilda Swinton reads Rumi’s poem “Like This” translated by Coleman Barks. Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī, also known as Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Balkhī, and more popularly as Rūmī (1207 – 1273), … Continue reading
Gary Margolis: It Pleases Me
interview with Georgia O’Keeffe at 90, 1977 to paint the bones inside the sky to bring them home to light my brush here on Lake George the desert inside my … Continue reading
