Everything physical, everything specific: the sharp scent of the woods that night in the Adirondacks when the rain drummed down on the canvas tent. The cold clear water that dazzled your body when you plummeted from the rope swing. The softness of the loam under your boots that cold dawn hike in Vermont. How free … Continue reading Poem of the Week, by Danusha Lameris
Last fall I began getting letters like this from the president, the vice-president, the NRA, anti-abortion organizations. Not my typical mail. Why me? Then it came to me: in August a friend died, a Marine combat veteran, and in his honor I made a donation to the Wounded Warrior project, which must have triggered a … Continue reading Poem of the Week, by William Stafford
Last summer, driving to Vermont, I detoured past my grandparents’ dairy farm. That’s how I think of it –their farm, on McGhee Hill Road–even though it’s been almost half a century since it changed hands, bought by city dwellers who turned the barn into a house and the house into guest quarters. This time, instead … Continue reading Poem of the Week, by Armen Davoudian
Who am I? What is my place in this world? How do I stay steady and strong and never stop trying to help the world? Our burning planet. The onrush of artificial intelligence. This heedless erosion of democracy. These are my three biggest panics. Panic is the right word but not the right reaction, because … Continue reading Poem of the Week, by Martha Postlethwaite
Once, when he was about eight, my son looked up at me and said, “Mama, what if we’re all characters in a book, and someone is writing us right now?” Once, before the scale at the Y was digital, I stepped on it ready to maneuver the sliding weights, only to find that the unknown … Continue reading Poem of the Week, by Lisel Mueller
How I first found this poem is lost to me –was it in one of my grandmother’s huge and heavy high school English anthologies?–but it stunned me. I remember laboriously copying it word by word, line by line, complete with the strange little marks I would later learn were scansion, into my diary. What the … Continue reading Poem of the Week, by Gerard Manley Hopkins
The summer I turned nineteen I took the bus west to Wisconsin, to work at a mom and pop resort where the owners housed us in a firetrap and fed us leavings from the guests’ plates. After the second bout of food poisoning –through which we worked between dashes to the bathroom–my friend Polly and … Continue reading Poem of the Week, by Alison Luterman
A beloved friend I lost touch with many years ago has been on my mind lately, so I googled him. My guess was he’d be out there somewhere, invisibly changing the world with his brilliance at math, and I was right. In our early twenties my friend gave me a small book titled Innumeracy, about how statistics … Continue reading Poem of the Week, by Paul Hostovsky
Years ago I bought some raw land on a slope in Vermont. Hired someone to grade a tiny cleared patch in the woods. Drilled a well. Bought a one-room cabin kit off eBay and hired a carpenter to put it together. Spent many days and nights staring up from the porch and the hammock at … Continue reading Poem of the Week, by Tess Gallagher
Certain moments are burned into your brain and heart, moments that even as they happened you knew would haunt you forever, like the way your little boy nodded and kept nodding, that one afternoon on the couch. Looking back now, through the tunnel of time, there are passages so rough that you narrowed time down … Continue reading Poem of the Week, by Gregory Orr
On James Baldwin and Diverse Literature
Putting those recalcitrant toddler cancer cells to bed...
your own PDK for writing
a collection of beautiful words.....
Objects, Memory and Meaning
If it can't be said in a hundred words, then it can't be said in a thousand.
sewing a handmade wardrobe
"drink from the well of your self and begin again" ~charles bukowski
The Good Things Black People Do, Give and Receive All Over The World
Musings on poetry, language, perception, numbers, food, and anything else that slips through the cracks.
Thoughts on the world around me
the literary asylum
Bipolar is my superpower
