Explore Diverse Voices

“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

Blay, Yaba. “How the ‘One Drop Rule’ Became a Tool of White Supremacy.” LitHub, 22 Feb. 2001.1 CBC Radio. “Black Teen Shot in the Head After Knocking on the Wrong Door Doing ‘Exceptionally

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

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

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

Several years ago, I bought some coffee filters, and after opening the pack, I realized they were the wrong size for my Mr. Coffee, too small. I held the ripped-open package of 100 coffee filters (now 99) and faced a quandary.

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?

One sees all manner of life rock up in the waiting room of a doctor’s surgery. You have the red-faced teens with their embarrassing infections sat next to the bleary-eyed mammies comforting scabby-arsed babies.

for i royal black sabah lil gallish gal flashed
my baby sphinx butt on may 1st weighin in
at 3 pounds up from 2.5 just
2 weeks ago ohhhh how i bozoed

I want to be the woman flying
toward art, who prefers the surreal

painting over any man, even new love.

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.

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

First, big congratulations on your forthcoming story collection, which includes a vivid voice-driven Solstice story that literally packs a punch: ‘Bare Knuckle.’ 

I knew the price I’d pay
if I danced my soul for you.
Shined my shoes with oil
from the sunflowers we once grew.

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.

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

Listen up. You’re gonna take your hand. And you’re gonna reach into the bag.

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

That day in the neighbor’s front yard it was so hot
everyone stripped shirtless, in cutoffs, shorts, knees

One, I imagine she’s in the throes of
writing her first graphic novel, this young
woman, a remarkable piece entitled New Tales

Mark Rothko’s vast rectangles interpose
themselves. There’s this too: pink light h

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.

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.

For Japanese Americans, today, February 19, is the Day of Remembrance, when we look back to 1942 when President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066; this proclamation removed 120,000 Japanese Americans from the West Coast and put them in concentration camps in desolate areas of the West and South.

On the day he died Jack DeFazio stood and waited for a number to materialize, an idea to emerge from the dark recesses of the casino, a word to become flesh above a green table. Nothing.

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.”

Like some unseen blight burrowed deep in the local vines, divorce kept preying on Boundary Street. The trend seemed a stealthy contagion drawing closer and closer, its malign influence headed squarely at the Copeland’s corner lot.

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.

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

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.

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

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 the beginning, they were like goldfish, barely visible as they floated beneath the surface of the tepid bathwater. It was Sunday in England, the day we had a bath.

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

(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,

In the early days of that frigid winter, Whitt spent half his time staring out the kitchen window. His beloved guitar leaned unplucked and gathering dust against a wall.

They grasp the edges of the off-white parachute
in 1st-grade gym class, soles of their sneakers
peeling off, nursery rhymes rendered mute
like a poisoned pond emptied of frogs’ croaks.

One night, we meet the boogeyman. My friends and I, arms linked, are belting a top forties hit. We are a loud and proud girl group. As we crest the hill, a man stands laughing across the street.

someone cherished the tiny beasts,
sleek and defenseless:
the crocodile, the adder, the cat, the dog,
a couple of birds.

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.

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 arrive home days later than my sisters, guilty for living so far away, heart-bruised from the lack of a welcome. There is no call from my mother at an open door: Julia’s here!

The 12 images seen here represent three different series made across decades.

First an earthy earth,
then another—no, the very same
suddenly unearthly.

You are not allowed to speak once the lights go out, and the doors are locked. No one wants to hear your songs once it’s dark, and you’ve been shut away, but you keep singing anyway. Your name is Evangeline, and you will never let it be forgotten.

At the end of “Barbie,” different models through time flash on the movie screen alongside the credits. It was then that I remembered I own a Barbie.

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.

Dear Ethel,

I lost your ring.
It was the only thing of yours we had, other than the letters you and Julius exchanged.

Self-perception, identity, and the quiet injuries we inflict upon ourselves.

mixing with the trees’ exhalations, it’s why that cool
permeates the air under trees at twilight.
But sometimes a house just sits there, impervious

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.

We could go years without it ever happening, and then word would spread that we were going to get to see a movie.

A total eclipse of the sun illuminates the order of the cosmos.

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.

-for Jennifer Martelli

Even the morning word games mourn you.

Bunion turned
Habit step
As men
Step vainly into men

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?

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

—after Psalm 130

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

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

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

Reckoning (n): a count, computation, calculation

I like life enormously—

Yes, when it’s a big dog looking to catch
my eye and lean in heavily against me
with its thick hair, its petal soft ears,
and I like life when it doesn’t behave,

Quiet now.
The flag-shredding wind
has passed. Door left open,
you are gone.

Puzzle pieces, each from a different set, end up with gaps to fill
with mind and whatnot. From afar they’re curlicues fluent in
longing–there’s too much to say about longing we’d better leave it

We talk about other things, but not class
in class. I think in class we don’t talk
about class because the university has

collapsed star,
two am Navajo darkness and
waves of string-theory echo
blue sage branches,
canyon red arroyo – glitter pollen dust

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.

When I was a junior in college, a friend handed me a copy of When Women Were Birds by Terry Tempest Williams. We’d been intimate with each other’s obsessions and sleep schedules, sharing a bed to save money, hardly ever using it at the same time.

When you carry a ghost
long enough, you make
a home for him
in your marrow.

When I make sofrito with my mom’s hands I peel the garlic and then smash its teeth like someone unfulfilled. I chop the onions into small pieces of shattered dreams and shed not a tear for what could have been.

I sank into the red sofa, too heavy to stand again. A small wooden table in front of me held a few books and my computer, connected to the TV by an HDMI cord.

– Dying is this losing weight in a loop –
all the lemmas we’re fond of
left to decompose in an unfamiliar tongue
of worms and mud, the fragile stem
of body, crossed by a tremor
of fireflies, the gaze folded back on itself.

When I first saw Nestor, he was sitting in a wrought-iron chair in the hibiscus–filled courtyard of Havana’s Dulce María Loynaz Cultural Center.

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.

A large, gold-framed portrait photograph of my maternal great-grandfather dominates one wall of the attic room where I write. With increasing frequency, I find myself musing about the similarities and differences between us.

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

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

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

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.

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

In reverse, the red ribbon on the gift box
loosens, it opens, the sterling silver charm

shaped like a trumpet, returns to the charm rack.
The earth above you floats clumsily,

Ivan Dobnik’s poems are deceptively pastoral. In “Where the Forest Season Ends,” the lush and magical depiction of lighting a fire in the forest as a child becomes a metaphor for the unwitting destruction of the forest as “its shadows fall through the poem” and “the flames persist […] in the trusted wilderness of primeval space.”

Christine Lavant in “Earth if you had two lips” speaks passionately to Earth in a voice that may well speak for humanity in our time, believing we are friends but also fearing that we are destroying ourselves by the lies we tell ourselves concerning the way we treat it.

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

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

Incubation period I un know in
redacted lines Nav guidance touches
on hospital foster care agency
the yearning of two & three Longing

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

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

back and forth
in an open car door

My first psychedelic trip was at a hospital in West Haven, Connecticut, a few miles from Yale University. My husband and cousin were eating pizza in downtown New Haven, while I was hooked up to a saline IV drip, a wet washcloth draped on the back of my neck, watching the show Friends. Everything was luminous while simultaneously mundane.