Explore Diverse Voices

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.

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

“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

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

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

back and forth
in an open car door

Reckoning (n): a count, computation, calculation

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

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

Margot never liked her name, which was unfortunate because she was sitting in a doctor’s office waiting to hear it. Margot.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 sun is off
In prayer
In breath abide
Words’ apogee

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

—after Psalm 130

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

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?

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—

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

-for Jennifer Martelli

Even the morning word games mourn you.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

I witnessed a livestreamed genocide, 

From the brick in my hand.

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.

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

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!

(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,

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.

Bunion turned
Habit step
As men
Step vainly into men

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

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

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

Briefly, while I watch Lion King with my son
for the billionth time until I finally snap
it off. Enough.