Our society is increasingly global, and the era of Covid-19 is no different. We may forget our localities and the importance of community in consuming the news and internet media. One city, the domain…
Poetry
June 9, 2021
June 2, 2021Photo by Oluwaseyi Johnson / Unsplash I was lucky to meet Romalyn Ante when I was invited to read at a virtual event organized by R. A. Villanueva and hosted by Books Are Magic in August…
April 27, 2021On the Yangtze River, through the Wu Gorge / Photo by Perfect Zero / Flickr Summer Elegy …
April 13, 2021Juan Felipe Herrera / © UC Riverside / Courtesy of Blue Flower Arts For the 44th Annual Writers Week, the University of California, Riverside department of Creative Writ…
February 18, 2021Photo by Russ Morris / Flickr Some may live just a block away, even nearer: the Walmart clerk who’d coolly hook a hot wire to your gonads, the grease monkey keen on beheading, the cleanin…
February 9, 2021The seacoast at Mykonos / Photo by the author In Andros, I Watch a Goat Run to and away from My Father’s Hands He opens his eyes. His eyes …
February 3, 2021Photo by Jes Timms / Unsplash for Vishnu Khare How to convey one’s well-being over the phone, It’s going all right, All that is there is good or nothing is good. The main th…
January 6, 2021Photo by Matt Artz / Unsplash I write with words that have shadow but don’t shelter no sooner do I start this page insomnia burns it not the words but what they consume is what reality star…
December 10, 2020Photo by Patrick Robert Doyle / Unsplash Four Scars for a Nameless Town 1 I come from a town with no name, no smiles of children under the trees. My town…
November 17, 2020Detail of Robert Aitken’s Samuel Gompers Memorial, 1933, Washington, DC / Photo by takomabibelot / Flickr What book he was reading – we still don’t know, For Shakespeare doesn’t tell us. Jus…
November 11, 2020Käthe Kollwitz, Pietà (Mother with Dead Son), 1937 (enlarged by Harald Haake in 1993), Neue Wache, Unter den Linden, Berlin / Photo by deadmanjones / Flickr / Original sculpture in the K…
November 10, 2020Photo by Dave Phillips / Unsplash We heard the trucks pull up, the barking voices, a woman in the street –Irina? – putting up a fight. Each night, the bell’s insistent buzz, the foot-stomp…
October 9, 2020Photo by Nebojsa Mladjenovic / Flickr Series editor’s note: In Chris Abani’s poem “Ritual Is Journey,” the black man has been laid bare on the page, his histories refocused, and thou…
October 2, 2020Detail from a photograph of the author’s great-great-grandmother and a photograph of her mother, age eleven. Image courtesy of the author Series editor’s note: In Aracelis Girmay’s n…
September 24, 2020Beginning October 7, the Catamaran Center for the Literary Arts will offer a Zoom class called Around the World with Six Poets. The following interview with th…
September 23, 2020Nina Simone Sings the Blues (RCA Victor, 1967) Series editor’s note: In Jamaica Baldwin’s “Windfall,” the self is buried beneath layers and layers of internalized memor…
September 21, 2020Sheep’s Head Lighthouse / Photo by John Finn / Flickr Author’s note: For about seven years now, Kwame Dawes and I have been writing long poem-dialogues that have so far appeared as f…
September 11, 2020“Girl and a Margin” Image: Ladan Osman. Collage: Joe Penney. Series editor’s note: In Ladan Osman’s piece “Dark Matter Girls,” the poet quietly asks herself, and by extension us, how…
August 26, 2020Photo by Daniel McCullough / Unsplash Series editor’s note: What happens in the aftermath of a long, ravaging war? What happens to folks whose country is always at war with them? The…
August 5, 2020Photo by Mitchell Luo / Unsplash Series editor’s note: In Saddiq Dzukogi’s new poem, the speaker observes as a snake shows up unannounced, unsummoned, and sluggishly inserts its head…
July 15, 2020Photo by Dustin Humes on Unsplash Series editor’s note: I’ve always thought of poetry as a sacred ground to think and write about things we wouldn’t normally do. And in the case of S…
July 8, 2020"Abstract Yellow Cliffs," Acrylics, 73x50cm by Kazuya Akimoto. Used with permission from the artist. Series editor’s note: In Matthew Shenoda’s new poem, “Seeing,” the writ…
July 7, 2020Photo by Richard Lee / Unsplash [A flock of cranes] A flock of cranes crosses an ashen sky the prophet…
June 30, 2020Photo by John Fisher Manoomin. It is the first Ojibwe word I will learn. It means wild rice, or “food that grows on water.” The sound of it is fitting. Less sibilant than rice…
June 29, 2020Photo courtesy of the author for Rachelle 4/27/2020 Our moms were widows before they met our fathers. Their hair blue-black, their hands already chapped, caressed by Inglis die-ca…
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Kwame Dawes courtesy of Blue Flower Arts
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. . . I sleep early, risebefore daylight, waitwith patient stuporthe coming gray light. . . I move slowly,surreptitiously — ananimal hungry to find…
