Passing through the yardChoked with thirsty grass,You might see the newestAdults huddled in tight circles. Never alone. The beast mother isAll they know. —from “Mother of Beasts,” Volume 64, Issue 4 (Winter 2023) Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.Good Advice About Bears came as a result of a guided meditation . . .
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Graffiti for Palestine at the Teacher-Student Centre, University of Dhaka. Photo by Frameofashik, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Beyond Politicians As Israel’s war on the Palestinian people escalated, in the aftermath of Hamas’ October 7 attack on a rave and two kibbutzim in southern Israel, protests erupted around the globe. Educators . . .
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In a quiet hall, beneath a church in Chicago’s West Side, too many of us stand in a circle and wait for introductions. Some with our headphones on, our fingers crossed. Others with our eyes on the trays of food. The radio on my hip burrs. Pitches. Hums. Condenses—until I can hear . . .
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Malak Mattar, When Family Is the Only Shelter (painted during the 2021 assault on Gaza). A massacre is unfolding in Rafah, where the population of two-thirds of the besieged Gaza strip—over 1.5 million Palestinians—has been forcibly displaced. News that the Egyptian state is building a prison camp to receive Palestinians, presumably after . . .
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Countée Cullen, c.1927 Review of Countée Cullen’s Harlem Renaissance by Kevin A. Brown. Forthcoming in 2024 from Parlor Press. Will our life’s work be considered a lead melody or an accompanying harmony in the symphony of history? Does it matter if one plays first or fourth chair in the orchestra if we are talking . . .
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Equal parts energy and mass, bodies are heldtogether by light. You learn how lightpollutes, dependent on its ability to scatter.The womb gets lighter with every daughteryou have and every daughter you don’t have.Those daughters weigh stones hand overfist before building them into your womblike a ballast or fallen wall.—from “I Ask My . . .
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The man who is about to ask you to marry him grabs the check from the little tin tray and slides the three fortune cookies toward you.“All yours,” he says. You grin and he grins back. Three years together, and you have your rituals, your routines. When you have pizza, he . . .
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(Photo by Giacomo Sartori) (Earth Primer #9) I had grown accustomed to earthy alpine soils, with their scent of moss and sap. Then, without warning, I suddenly found myself dealing with the soils of a valley lined with the disciplined rows of apple orchards covering every wedge of the wavy hillsides, even . . .
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George Kalamaras collection What My Hound Dog Is Scenting Through the Sloughgrass Is a Way of Scenting Me is out now from Wolfson Press. George had a poem in our Summer 2017 issue. The debut novel, Coming Clean, by Beth Uznis Johnson was released this month from Regal House Publishing. Her essay, “Penance and Pandemic,” . . .
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(Photo: Jewish Voice for Peace) Affiliates and allies with Jewish Voice for Peace at the Statue of Liberty on Monday, November 6, 2023. This International Holocaust Remembrance Day will not be like any other. As we mark the seventy-ninth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz on January 27 and commemorate the six . . .
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