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.
Jason Baldinger: time is dead
time died three weeks ago it went quietly no friends or family by the bedside no obituary no news no soundbyte I heard a reputable source say it had … Continue reading
Connie Post: Iron Will
I still see her, standing there
fastening a floral apron
tripping on the cord of her own life
Jason Baldinger: Résumé
apparently just to live
just to experience life
is not an acceptable trade
Vox Populi 