4 Poems
Safia Elhillo
Ode to Swearing
back home this is the worst profanity
what men use when they need to curse . . .
back home this is the worst profanity
what men use when they need to curse . . .
Category:Words
Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin White Masks and the Social Sickness of Racism
Miguel Morrissey
Racism is rampant and unspoken, denied and obvious. In a country of diverse terrain, we nonetheless remain connected via media, social utterances, and responses to certain events. It is easy to say “I am not a racist” or to believe…
Small Gifts: Writing with My Berklee Students
Eunice Flanders
I am privileged to teach music students, and as a writer, I think it important Berklee students understand the history and connection between lyrics and poetry. I start each class with either a poem or song lyrics, which I treat…
That’s What You Get
Mark Pawlak
Two truths approach each other: One comes from inside, the other from outside, and where they meet, we have a chance to catch sight of ourselves.
—Tomas Tranströmer, from “Preludes”
“Why do you want to go so far away to…
Dance Looking at the Sun
Robert Bensen
“The Old Ones who gave us these songs and dances said that when we do this, they will come and hear our prayers for help and healing,” Buck Ghost Horse told me years ago, inviting me as he did every…
Slither
Halle Wood
As sunlight peeks through the humid, foggy morning, I look out the car window to see clumps of fallen trees lying in odd, abandoned piles, across the road. Crippled branches, bent and contorted, reach towards the car like brittle fingers.…
Trump and the Battle for Human Nature
Frances Moore Lappé
Feeling blindsided, baffled, or just bewildered, Americans are asking, How did we get here? New York Times conservative columnist Ross Douthat likens the experience of observing Republican dysfunction to seeing “a calf born with two heads…watching something that the laws…
First Jazz
Pete Mullineaux
Coltrane, cool train
taking vinyl track
with swerve
and verve, hip dip
curve of lip, gravity
bending light
with thumb
and fingertip
on moon
reflecting keys –
take a winding scale from
the black bottom
of a southern swamp
up…
The Ungrateful Son
Dinty W. Moore
After the tale by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm
Once a man was sitting with his wife. They had roasted a chicken which they were about to eat together. Then the man saw that his aged father was approaching, and he…