Be The Change
A Heat Dome Scorches the Heart
I want to smash a violin on the tree it was made from. To soak up the blood of martyrs with my eyes, die a glorious death and live on, weeping, sweating blood. It's 118 in Siberia.
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Be The Change
Status Quo Ante
I had a dream where from an impossible height I took in all the splendor and all the pain we’ve learned to live with.
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.
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?
poetry
I Remain Marvelously Alive
In the creak and give of floorboards, hollow of trees felled by storms, fists of despots, palms of departing lovers, click of deadbolts, swing of doors;
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.