Explore Diverse Voices

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

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.

There’s a storm gathering in my attic:
Pokémon cards, old novels, broken lamps
and art projects, paint chips flaking to the floor,
that picture of my younger self that haunts me.

Michał Sobol is an awarded Polish poet whose poetics is marked by restrain and condensation, at the same time displaying existential tension. Sobol transfigures ordinary experiences into philosophical, political, or historical moments of unease or disquietude.

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

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

I first heard about you in a library board meeting. A homeless guy had been playing video games on the library computer. The director, a young guy with a red beard and close-set eyes, said that he made one of the employees uncomfortable.

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

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.

How delicious and fragile we humans look,
pacing the diving platform in a bikini
or board shorts, arms and legs

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

Reckoning (n): a count, computation, calculation

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.

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.”

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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?

—after Psalm 130

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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. 

Dear Ethel,

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

I said to my kids, “Trust me, you don’t want to know. You’ll wish you could go back to not knowing, but by then it’ll be too late.”

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

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

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 witnessed a livestreamed genocide, 

From the brick in my hand.

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

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

“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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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,

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

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!

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

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.

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.”

– 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.

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

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.

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

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

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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