Explore Diverse Voices

Tonight a wind plays attentively
–mindful of that loud clashing of blades—

TANGO]
the sound of copters rising from a distant field or if you were out
of range mistaken for wingbeats of mandarin ducks setting down

if the tall tree died the absence
would be taller i hope the maple
lives but the tree guy says it

After ten years away the old ground looked about the same. Exposed bedrock of red sandstone and limestone, juniper-piñon woodlands. Oak brush, pads of prickly pear, claret cup and hedgehog cactus with their explosive yellow blossoms.

Reckoning (n): a count, computation, calculation

About a middle-aged woman’s lifelong struggle with body issues in the guise of a real estate listing.

A superhero origin story, his “power” the unbearable gift of knowing death’s inevitability.

Fugue State speaks to the potential loss of the tangible photograph in future generations. I observe my children, part of the most documented generation in history, creating thousands of images for their social media outlets, but am painfully aware that they have never made a photographic print and will most likely have no physical photographs

—after Psalm 130

The rabbi is sitting with me
on the floor, my hand
reaching for your
earlobe through
the sheet’s barrier—

When I travel I touch my passport often,
as if it was a talisman, or the foot of a rabbit

Zini in February, dusty ochre and dry. Where the village & I fulfill ceremony prescribed. From sun up to sun down for days. Nursing akpeteshie, the men sit beneath a fruitless mango tree. But Goddesses cast in all shades of night Yoginis of their own Rite—Women wield elements in malasana. They cook and bear the

Little Rock High School, 1957   Memory of course alters the facts, but what remains are shrieking voices, nails on chalkboard, siren shrills, mothers ready to hiss and claw. Our mother said we’d learn more that day watching TV in Brick Town, New Jersey than going to school.  But did she guess we’d learn how scary

“Post-traumatic stress is the result of a fundamental reorganization of the central nervous system based on having experienced an actual threat of annihilation (or seeing somebody else being annihilated), which reorganizes self experience…and the interpretation of reality.” –Bessell van der Kolk, The Body Keeps The Score   “The more catastrophic events we’re exposed to as

Standing and praying, a man in a black yarmulke.
His body rocks, swaying back and forth,
his lips moving, murmuring. My lips,

Translated from the Russian by Margaree Little THE STALIN EPIGRAM We live, not sensing the country beneath us, our speech can’t be heard at ten steps away, but where there is room for a half-conversation, there we remember the mountaineer in the Kremlin. His thick fingers, like maggots, are fat, and his words, like pound-weights,

PART 1: A Period of Adjustment             Two weeks after Roger Pratt graduated from Georgetown Law School in Washington DC, he and his fiancé Joyce Johnson, drove back to their hometown of Chicago in a modest, rented van with a few boxes of clothes and other belongings. They had lived in

Four AM. Miami-Dade County was as quiet as it would ever be until the sun winked out but still too noisy. Cruising west on 41, I half-listened to the radio to block out the tumult.

-for Jennifer Martelli

Even the morning word games mourn you.

Food Planet Future: The Art of Turning Food and Climate Perils Into Possibilities, my book and traveling exhibition, draws upon art, research, and innovative practices to reimagine the tangled crises of food security, climate change, and biodiversity loss. My work has been featured in national and international magazines, museums and juried shows.  As an educator

back and forth
in an open car door

For this journey, forget practical things.
Begin with touch and smell, silk and mohair
bird feathers, silver frog for joy, comb

My heart aches, and the same drowsy song begins
Ba-dum-ba-dum-ba-dum. Tree empties itself
into my beak. Tells me how people turn

The intersection of Proctor, Boston, and Bridge Streets in Salem, Massachusetts is drab. A Dunkin Donuts spreads its pink and beige cheer; there’s an empty fenced-in lot with a coating of rubble, a three-family brick building, and a Walgreens, fringed with a parking lot. It’s an area no one has bothered to spruce up; the businesses will do their business regardless.

I close the door to my sky blue room.
To feel you there behind it.
The sky blue room is incomplete and imperfect.

Perp-Walk Prologue I was a good girl. Before I went viral, before anyone chanted about locking me up or threatened me with death (at first only online), I never expected to be arrested. When I first got handcuffed, I couldn’t stop crying. Wondering: how can this be happening to me? A hard-working scholarship kid; a

A scientific theory used to describe abrupt evolutionary changes that create new species They say dinosaurs shrank to become birds. Locomotion forsaken for tree limbs and flight. Bird-hood is not a phase I am familiar with, tiny lifetimes between bristles to quills to filoplumes. The lines of any change are never neat. A spectacle of

In the discipline of humanities, I study topics and ideas that encourage me to question things. I don’t make anything or produce a product. Are my books of poetry and translation products? If so, I don’t make any money from them. Do I produce questions? I question systems that produce work from music and artmaking.

The words were easy to write, even with young hands, even the letters to my father about the hurricane or the collapse  of a house the trapping  of bodies. the legs swinging  from a tree. They were about yesterdays, the what  fell, the what  struck, the who  died. My father said it was the reading

People often disappeared from our apartment building on Manila Ave. At least that’s what Kuya Jem used to tell us. He wasn’t really our brother. That’s just what everyone in our building called him—Kuya. He did a lot of things for us and the other tenants. In the morning, he tended to the halaman planted

The second time I heard him play, he sat
facing his windows overlooking the river.

The whale is beached again,  Has he no sense  of direction? Is he clinically  depressed? Gulls  flap close and closer to his eyes,  inspecting  the vitreous humor. Sandpipers dance  on the strand,  annoying as sleep-deprived toddlers.  He will miss  the various colors of the seas,  the mating,  the krill cuisine, hunting  gigs, the sheer  clown

The fog hasn’t rolled in this summer evening and Charu rather enjoys the warm weather during her half-hour walk from the Berkeley Downtown BART station to the Krishna temple.

There are times when I miss it, throwing back shots with friends, bumpin’ that bumpin’ as Charli might say Feeling oceanic low, getting seraphic high, just to feel infinitely lower on those blurry nights, lighting the butt-end of cigarettes, crying in the passenger seat of Leo’s beater, remembering that thing I did when I was

(Elba Songs)

In Chiessi, the fish came from the sea in the morning

after the Costa del Sole sunsets,

where one makes love overhanging the Tyrrhenian Sea,

He sits in front of a wall of glass, and his glass, which was made of plastic, was already empty.

Weather flew across the field. Over the horizon the land tacked to a cloud. The field continued into night a far town lit.

The first time I danced for Harry, he would not look at me. His eyes stayed fixed on something just over my shoulder or above my head, so that though it seemed he was watching me as I moved, he really wasn’t. I really, really wanted him to watch. I was wearing the mid-calf indigo

The man’s grey eyes, no light in them. The tug on the corners of his mouth rendering a smile impossible. Lucy had seen a look like that before.

The first time I saw the Saguenay River it was nighttime. I was driving along the north shore of the St. Lawrence River and stopped at Tadoussac where the road is connected by a car ferry.

I witnessed a livestreamed genocide, 

From the brick in my hand.

A day before the long drive to Northampton, where I would join friends in a book talk about war and language, I arrived at a small town emergency room, signed in, took a seat, and for the next half hour mulled over what had led me there.

I loved the first season of Survivor. We watched it, I think, when Graham was barely five. It was about the time we forced marched him along the Wissahickon Creek. Maybe we’d just moved to Philadelphia, or maybe we were in Belchertown. Anyhow, it was exciting to see people who would never choose to be

I remember I was at the end of a long twisted phone chord in a corner of my parents’ front hall when you first asked me out the summer before we went to college. You said I’d like to take you to Houlihan’s for dinner, knowing I liked the booths in the back that were shrouded by plastic vines and noisy strands of beads.

Mephistopheles and Faustus had been eating roast duck
With pancakes and scallions in a Chinese restaurant
In Midtown, and after dinner, they’d gone for a walk

when I worked in the military, it reminded me of the prison, and when I worked in the prison, I was surprised at how many inmates stabbed themselves.  I thought they would stab each other, but they were united in the deaths of their nights, their tears, their dress, their laughter, their hornet-mouths, how they

Today, these tears are tulips, gnashing ego petals
lured gold, all raining around brown eyes.

Also, but I am weaker
than you, because you were enslaved.

After Sharon’s death, shot dead on the street on her way to his place, possibly by a stray bullet, Withers lost his art. His photography exhibits, Men with Beards and Beautiful, Beautiful, Turds, had put him on the map. And now, after her murder, Pictures of Sharon. What did it matter? One solitary bullet, whether

In the summer of 1975, my Uncle Marvin sent for us to stay with him in Chicago by telephone. Just the girls, he’d said, leaving my brother Michael to himself in Robbins. We were ecstatic.

The sun is off
In prayer
In breath abide
Words’ apogee

Ionian, from the dark depths emerged the waters
from the hoarse and mighty voice of the underground
was generated the blind furrow of the Mediterranean.
Volcanoes and shadows took shape, and the sea

they told me to pray for him,
for his success. that doing otherwise
was like rooting against the pilot
while sitting on the plane—

In Poland, a daughter reflects on the complexities of love and addiction through the lens of a cherished family tradition.

We went to a school where most of our uncles became our fathers, the farther your father went, the more uncles you had. We were the fortunate ones, the boys who had uncles who helped us strum and string and sing along lonely guitars. Others weren’t so fortunate, they were the ones who forgot the

Your husband and you lean over the edge, rooftop parking. Both of you panting, him holding his side. Bags from holiday shopping strewn near your feet. You watch four men meet in the center of the street below as if each of them advanced from designated corners of a boxing ring.

The first time I clapped eyes on Echo Wolfeson she was playing a kangaroo.

New in town, I’d gone to meet the coaches. In Jackson, the sport was politicized. More oligarchy than meritocracy. I went into the Field House prepared to make my case. Show film. Stats. I had it all ready.

The trouble began three days ago when Tingting had stopped answering Betty’s calls, messages, then emails. For two days, before she arrived at the high school where she taught orchestra, Betty had waited outside Tingting’s pharmacy clinic.

You’ve surpassed your message quota for the month. May we recommend the Unlimited Option?   Unlimited plan – is Heaven – but comes at a hefty price – steals away those we love prisons them – in Paradise. I make my way – among the Living – tender electric currencies – value what can be

there is a lone man on the cusp
on a wide-open palm of stone quarried
where the pressure of plural millennia of magma
and wind, after, where once was sea, 
have left uplands of igneous isles to traverse

Some of us are born blacklisted—don’t want work in the womanly arts. Others choose to wait and see. Here’s a gender song, gentle. A two song, a chain? O my small starlet sunk I apologize to your past future self, hosed down the drain of my most need, gurgling. I apologize to no-one else. The

“the Lourdes of America”

you look for a back-channel negotiation,
but no plea is offered only the pretense
you would accept a lesser sentence, time

The silences yearn and the sun falls.
The first, great dark cleaves
the brown humps of a valley
that reposes. A shattered moon hangs

It wasn’t that the eagle didn’t love you,
that his plumage wasn’t cut like a paper
snowflake is cut, repeating itself like a heart
is cut, or repeats itself—No.

I was teaching seventh-grade Humanities in New York City when the first plane hit. 

On certain November afternoonsa shine of water slidesover windows in the room and the aquariumof your life dense with silence likea household wave it rises up unfeignedto lap the walls and the opalescentreflection of the absent ones: they’re lined uplike a small army on the dresser,two-dimensional and smiling from their frontierlimbo, they seem to want

A serious injury and a surreal journey through the medical circus that ensues.

For decades, I hid the fact that my family operated a Thai restaurant. Whenever someone asked what my parents did for a living, I’d respond with a vague non-answer: “Um, I just have my mom and grandmom, and they work in the food industry.” Over time, I developed a knack for stalling and redirecting, posing

Artist’s Statement: “That afternoon was as blue as an opaline glass” is the second series in which Carolina Baldomá explores the emotional universe of girls undergoing the metamorphosis of adolescence, a permeable zone where uncertainty and contradictions intertwine. Something magical and enigmatic emerges in these fragile and ethereal young women, who at the same time

Artist Statement: I believe the portrait can disclose more about the subject than what is found on the surface. The subject, either willingly or subconsciously, shows us more than they intend. The camera can see more than the naked eye, moving past our persona and catching a glimpse of who we really are. With this

After bandaging blisters and taping arches, we bent our shoes in half, worked the toe boxes softened through repetition and sweat, stuffed the tips with matted wool, snuffed each foot inside, wrapped ribbons taut in pink X-es, knots tucked inside the ankles. Then to the rosin box, to grind pointes and heels against yellow powder in a crust of sticky crystals. Without rosin,

A curious child witnesses a tragic event and contends with the question, why would someone take their own life?

the year is nineteen ninety-nine
judge judy is playing
with my pre-rolls some group sings happy

translated from the Slovene by Miriam Drev    from BECKETT – MY ADVOCATE 2 where a blind alley ends where you train silence to be voice what is a bird’s twittering without your word how do you appear without water in yourself you’re made of air and light you say body and here you are

You, standing on the disputed land.
Over there, with your ear to the sky.

What do you pray for when you go to bed at night?
Does the old muse of belonging visit you too, whispering?
Painting the promise of what could be behind your shut eyes, not yet asleep?

In the title poem of her remarkable new poetry collection, A Black Doe in the Anthropocene, Artress Bethany White recounts a tense encounter with an armed landowner as she is exploring the pine woods around the North Carolina plantation site where her ancestors had once been enslaved.

In his essay “Arendt in New York,” in our Winter 2017 issue, selected for inclusion in Best American Essays, Baron Wormser wrote “She has witnessed rant that silenced every reproof. She has waited for some larger affirmation to arise, the vision of decency, but none came.”

Monument Valley was the properly mythic place for meeting this mythic event, a solar eclipse. 

You know Banesa Delgado walks home with you cuz she hungry—right? I mean, you the fattest freshman in North Bergen High. You think the baddest bitch in the volleyball team—and that’s a lot to say, cuz alladem bad—wanna be seen nowhere with you?

Exploring the themes of family secrets, loss, and the things that remain unspoken in immigrant communities.

O, Gentle Reader,
lend me your noble ear. 
They call me Jean-Pierre.
I live in Vatovavy, a fiefdom
of charm & bliss.

But instead I’ll write about my sore throat.
Are they related? Some say, pains of the body
are feelings held on to by tissue and cell,
unexpressed like milk hardening in the breast

My mother used to say that lobsters scream when boiled, but it’s only air escaping the shell. I was seven when she first told me this, standing at her station in Cannery Building C, watching her feed crawlers into the steamer.

  Rhododendron bushes frame our little family group in a series of photographs: my mother, brother, sister-in-law, their baby, my boyfriend, and me. The bushes are filled with full, lush blossoms of red and white; glossy, deep blue-green leaves form a backdrop for those constellations of blooms. Before taking photographs in front of the rhododendrons,

for Jeanne beloved friend   let us start here with the boxes   beneath the eaves in a red caftan   your garnets promised by Isaiah   in covenant with god a prayer for our mothers    four are the matriarchs   three the patriarchs   two the tablets left in the PM pill box one your ram’s horn   your bangle one

The recent inferno at Louisiana’s Nottoway Plantation has unleashed a firestorm (no pun intended) of controversy. Memes abound on social media where Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, and ghosts of the formerly enslaved watch the fire burn in vindicated satisfaction.

It’s easy to forget that anything could happen, until something does. On November 11, 1979, a Sunday, I was working at my father’s horse farm on Vly Summit Road in Easton, New York, about ten miles south of Greenwich.

Bunion turned
Habit step
As men
Step vainly into men

we were driving through the oil crisis. How long Ohio felt. Or was it Pennsylvania? Each rest stop a Stuckey’s after Stuckey’s. My cheek healing unhurried from an early summer dog bite. At The Holiday Inn we swam so much, the people hushed us. Sunrise was a pillow, mom’s fist sneaking under my head. It