Category:Music

On the Formation of Clouds

Brian Turner

Late in 2017, with a breeze off the Bay of Bengal stirring through the tongue-shaped leaves, I sat under an ancient banyan and listened to the voices of birds I couldn’t name while that banyan moved imperceptibly closer to the waters of the Indian Ocean.
I recorded the birds in the branches as they called out to one another. I recorded the birds as they flew away and as they rowed their wings through the morning air and as they made their way into canopies of light and shade. I thought about where I was on this planet, and just how lost I was in my life. ...

Escape Velocity

Joel Peckham

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...

Tuning in to Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony

Katherine Dacey

“Not since the first Manhattan performance of Parsifal [in 1903],” Time magazine declared, “had there been such a buzz of American anticipation over a piece of music.”[1] That piece was Dmitri Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony, also known as the Leningrad,…

The Word Beauty Within the Broken Instrument of the Body

Brian Turner

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?
We were born four days apart and shared the same first name—though we didn’t meet until his family moved from Minnesota to California and into the same cul-de-sac when we were seven years old. We were raised like brothers from then on out ...

Kinds of Blues: 3 Songs & 3 Poems

Cornelius Eady

Cornelius Eady has published more than half a dozen volumes of poetry, among them Victims of the Latest Dance Craze (1985), winner of the Lamont Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets; The Gathering of My Name (1991), nominated for a Pulitzer Prize; and Brutal Imagination (2001), a National Book Award finalist.