From the new year, dolphins began dying
by the thousands, and those were the ones we saw,
their bodies washed up on the beaches…
“Remove your yellow star.
Head for Switzerland or try
for Nice. Don’t write your will
Don’t imagine what the Germans feel.”
Liz thinks we ought to have a day
devoted to apostrophes
In which we add or rub them out
in bands of roving grammar louts.
The number of vaquitas left was around 30 in early 2019. — . Today, news about small dolphins: Only sixty vaquitas left. Two years back, they numbered some one hundred “individuals,” living … Continue reading →
Inside my friends’ house (in the 18thcentury, a shop), I wake to the clank, clank, clank of the blacksmith’s hammer hard against iron, yellow orange, I imagine, from the forge. . … Continue reading →
21-year-old Scholl, with her older brother Hans, was guillotined on 22 February 1943 for being part of the White Rose, a group of students arrested for distributing anti-Nazi flyers. — … Continue reading →
The red-faced guard, his scant hair pressed like a wish against his boney pate, sat uniformed at the library gate sternly blocking the un-elect like me. After just a … Continue reading →
He argued like a champ, best of breed. You gave him his assumptions, you were dead. Or later claim he’d said something daft and he’d repeat verbatim, first to last, … Continue reading →
In our time, war seemed perpetual, an economic fact: pay to build a bomb, blow it up, pay to build another bomb, repeat, repeat, repeat. We stopped asking people of … Continue reading →
And you, who have not left your country because you must; you, untested by the state’s intent to harm; you, a lucky one, whose only life fattens and lazes on … Continue reading →
In our time we reckoned our dead in firearms— handguns, rifles, automatic weapons; in much-parsed constitutional clauses; in politicians bought by lobbyists and salesmen. In our time, we objected most … Continue reading →
Serbian men outside her house, her cousins shot, her sister raped repeatedly: the woman from Kosovo told this story as she cupped a candle to shield its fuddled flame. Elbow … Continue reading →
From a house in L’Aguiole, France, built in 1911 by a farmer, later a decorated sapeur-pompier in the Great War . Casement swung wide to receive the full moon and … Continue reading →
how can you withhold forgiveness
from the troubled man who cries,
begging to be left in peace