Be The Change
Correct Language Doesn't Correct Injustice
Changing the language we use when speaking about injustice does not, in and of itself, overturn the injustice.
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poetry
After Running Errands, I Think of the World I Want Us to Live In: A Villanelle
What is left after the groceries are put away? Dishes on the drying rack, nothing to clean: all is as it should be, or so they say.
poetry
During a Nor'easter I Seek Shelter from the Tumult: A Haiku
In this white-capped wind / a kite can fly a lifetime / never touching earth
poetry
Funeral Procession
On a drizzly morning walk I stopped to let a hearse go by, its pitch-black paint sweating polish, and as I waited for the procession I thought about who profits from tragedy, the business of loss, and who profits no matter what,
Be The Change
Blank
In Xinjiang, 7,000-miles away, a morning sun, reflecting off the glasses of early risers, the windshields of commuters, is so bright as to redact last night’s graffiti: Down with Xi.
America on the Brink
On Reading That Some Physicists Posit We Are Living in a Computer Simulation
If life is a lucid dream or some near-perfect computer simulation, do I risk waking up to a world in which I can’t embrace you?
America on the Brink
A Love Sonnet Written on the Occasion of the Death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg
I want to touch what aches in us, the light we guard to stay alive. My dear, come quick. I hear a knock; I’m afraid. Is it you? I dare to open and let hope come through.
poetry
Confessions of a Private Grief
I have lived as free as a fragrance on the wind, as shackled to the earth as the vine that produced it. May I confess in a poem what is forbidden us in prose?
America on the Brink
Helium
The last thing he saw was the joy in her eyes. Back home the flowers have wilted and the balloon, twisting slowly in the now-stale air, sinks lower and lower to the ground.
America on the Brink
Manumission
I so want to be optimistic and airy, to write of our generous spirit, to wax poetic about moon landings and beach landings, entrepreneurship, sliced bread, the assembly line, the World Wide Web. It feels un-American
America on the Brink
Self-Made Man
I hire the police that protect my home from the hordes that would tax me: I need nothing from the State, and so give nothing to the State.
poetry
The Beauty of Bipolar Depression
Peel back my eyes and touch the still-healing wound oozing cerebral fluid from the Big Bang. It’s in this blind space of raw pain I often dwell.