Category:Guest Artists

Pachysandra & Two Other Poems

Kimiko Hahn

Guest Artists Poetry
Baba, open your mouth so I can see your uvula,

the three-year-old granddaughter keeps saying.
And I don’t want to display my crowns to the one
calling me Baba which, strictly speaking,
means Old Hag but was easier than Obaachan
for a one-year-old and maybe I am, given the dental issues.
And maybe she’ll keep up her investigation so
I hand over my mobile: Take selfies of your own uvula!
And that works until she gets another great idea:
How about you find a picture of a whale's uvula? ...

Sharing the Darkness

Carolyn Forché

Essays Guest Artists
I wake with a start at midnight. A nightbird striking the window? A bat in the eaves? Maybe someone in the theater of my sleep gave me a nudge—someone I don’t know in waking life. It is cloudy and warm…

Escape Velocity

Joel Peckham

Guest Artists Music
It’s already been two months, my mother says, can you believe it? I can and can’t. But we are always moving even when we think we’re not, the earth spinning at 1500 feet per second while orbiting the sun /
at 100,000 feet per second while the sun and the earth and all the planets in the solar system whirl around the center of the Milky Way at incredible speed Even this, our galaxy among its cluster of galaxies, moves through space, sliding toward a central point. It is a wonder...

Well, What Would Lincoln Do?

John Burt

Essays Guest Artists
Of course, nobody really knows, and there are many reasons why. In the first place, nobody knows how Lincoln would have understood the century and half of political and social change since his own day. In the second place, Lincoln’s…

Vajra (Water song)

Kevin O’Keefe

Guest Artists Poetry
1

Some day, a day not on your calendar

And it shouldn’t be long from now

You’ll leave behind your shelter of

Practiced spontaneity and dull knives. ...

Two Poems from Bucha, Ukraine

Lesyk Panasiu, with introduction by Ilya Kaminsky

Guest Artists Poetry
“Russian soldiers stayed in our building,” the poet Lesyk Panaisuk wrote to me a few weeks ago. When the war began, Lesyk left Bucha in a hurry, fleeing the Russian invasion.

“War will live in Bucha long after the soldiers are gone,” Lesyk emails me, “because they left a lot of mines throughout Bucha.” Now it is dangerous to walk around the town. Lesyk’s neighbors found some mines in the halls of their building, inside their slippers and washing machines. Some neighbors returned only to install doors and windows. “In our neighbourhood doors to almost every apartment were broken by russian soldiers,” Lesyk writes.

Bucha Spring

Ksenia Rychtycka

Fiction Guest Artists
This fictionalized short story is dedicated to the memory of Ukrainian artist and designer Liubov (Luba) Panchenko, who endured a month of isolation and starvation in her basement while her hometown of Bucha was under brutal Russian occupation. She survived the occupation, but died on April 30, 2022, when her heart gave out. During the Soviet era, her artwork was censored due to its focus on Ukrainian symbolism and folk culture. She was not allowed to exhibit or publish her work. She was a member of the Ukrainian Sixtiers dissident movement, that advocated for freedom of cultural and creative expression.

The Word Beauty Within the Broken Instrument of the Body

Brian Turner

Guest Artists Music
After caring for my wife during her fight with cancer, and after caring for a family member with dementia, I cannot begin to fathom how caregivers continue their necessary work while living in Ukraine, as the full force of the Russian military brings ruin and pain and destruction to all in its path?