Philip Levine: Belle Isle, 1949
We stripped in the first warm spring night
and ran down into the Detroit River
to baptize ourselves in the brine
of car parts, dead fish, stolen bicycles,
melted snow.
Fred Shaw: To the Fuckhead Who Stole My Bike
gunning with the bebop of another
coaster at its last dip, the valves
of your heart opening
and closing without fail
Thom Hartmann: This Is the Dying Phase of Reaganism–and It’s Hideous
The question today is whether we as a nation and a people will recover from Reaganism, or if it will, as Reagan promised, destroy the American experiment of pluralistic liberal democracy.
Charles Davidson: Foster’s Pie Pan
He was a kind and gentle old fellow with a smudged face and scruffy beard. On his best days he appeared as tarnished and weather-beaten as his tin pie pan still does even now.
Barbara Hamby: The Tawdry Masks of Women
and when I see myself
in bus windows or store glass, the shock never wears off,
for I recognize myself and see a stranger at the same time
Michael Simms: Trigger Warning | Old White Guy Talks About Racism
White people don’t spend a lot of time talking about racism. Right-wingers dismiss racism as a talking point that black people use to get special treatment while left-leaning white people simply state that racism is an evil tendency among other white people, but not themselves.
Richard Hoffman: Summer Job
“The trouble with intellectuals,” Manny, my boss,
once told me, “is that they don’t know nothing
till they can explain it to themselves.
Barbara E. Young: Cousin Jill
I like a woman who can fall
Jack said to Jill.
Video: J.D. Vance| America’s Forgotten Working Class
J.D. Vance grew up in a small, poor city in the Rust Belt of southern Ohio, where he had a front-row seat to many of the social ills plaguing America: a heroin epidemic, failing schools, families torn apart by divorce and sometimes violence.
Mel Packer: Angie’s Place
Where back in the corner, there’s always some guy in a Pirates ballcap with skin like an old leather shoe who’s nursing the cheapest beer on tap….
Sydney Lea: Sunday Morning
…his left ring finger was hewn at the knuckle quite some years ago. If I think hard enough, I can remember when he was secretive about that injury. He kept the disfigured hand in his pocket or behind his back as much as he could.
Faiz Shakir: Democrats Must Commit Themselves to the Needs of Non-College Educated Workers
Workers without college degrees have suffered most from recent decades of neoliberal fetishization with globalization, unregulated open markets, and corporate-friendly free trade.
Adrian Blevins: Appalachians Run Amok
I’m impatient like you to get to the bottom of the problem
of what to call the vacant feeling of our long-ago deportation
from the goats & their creamy milk & the meadows & pastures
they would frolic in each Sunday when my father would
metaphorically herd them…
Michael Simms: Oh Darlin’
The intimacy
Of strangers is luminous, the way
We wish well for the man who lost
His car keys, the woman coming in
Out of the rain, the girl who missed
Her bus, the boy who stutters.
Vox Populi 