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Progressive Stocking Stuffers for Year Two of the Trump Era: Reading for Dark Times

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If you just can’t bring yourself to give up on the sordid consumer frenzy and go all in for a Buy Nothing Christmas, then perhaps getting your loved ones a few good books to help them navigate our dark times is the next best thing.  

Here is my list of a handful of some of the best books of the last awful year:
Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America by Nancy MacLean
No is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need by Naomi Klein
Thoreau, A Life by Laura Dassow Walls
New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson

  [Read more…]

Geo-Poetic Spaces: Red Flag Warming

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December
and the desert rattles trees
blows open doors
shut

Bends the knees of flags
toward foaming ocean

Fans palms
into flame   [Read more…]

Geo-Poetic Spaces: Black Friday for the Birds

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Black Friday crow parks
on top a new SUV

Sliding glass doors slide

A 3000 dollar suit
squawks outside
. flaps sleeves at air   [Read more…]

Brian Alexander’s ‘Glass House’: Examining Industrial Grief in the Heartland

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For those of us in California, the older industrial belt of the Midwest including Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, and western Pennsylvania, is a world away from us regarding immigration issues.  Our state is doing what it can to protect its immigrants from attacks from the Trump administration. But if we want good national immigration reform anytime soon, what happens in upcoming election cycles in the Midwest is very important.

The Republican Party has bought the Trump base with its anti-immigrant, nativist politics that only grow more rabid by the day.  The only path to improve national immigration laws in the near future is through the Democratic Party winning back the Congress in 2018 or 2020 on a platform of inclusion.  

While President Trump was elected by a majority of white voters in every popular category, it was the white “swing” voters in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, who had voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012, that were a surprising part of Trump’s narrow margin of victory in those states last year.

What’s going on back there to make this happen?   [Read more…]

Geo-Poetic Spaces: Portrait of My Parents As Lovers

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I don’t remember
the happy couple
pressed together
between two pages of Midwestern prairie

Never heard the words
love wrote inside high school dance cards   [Read more…]

Waiting for Dark Clouds to Lift Someday

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As I go along day to day, trying to move beyond the dark clouds that hover over me, I find myself indulging in reviving a few precious memories.

I see me in chorus in junior high school. Mr. Sidney Dawson is coaxing us to “sing it like you mean it” with a soulful expression on his face as he holds his hands over his heart.

I’ll always remember the day when we showed up at the Pioneer Hotel to perform, and the bellman said, “I can’t let you colored people come through the front door.”

And Mr. Dawson said, looking as serious as a heart attack: “Well, the mayor and some other VIPs are expecting us, and you gonna have some tall explaining to do – because we ain’t going in through no back door!”   [Read more…]

Geo-Poetic Spaces: Verdict

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Natural selection
has sealed its indictment
under sheets of melting ice

Rats
quibble over spoiled venison
in headlights   [Read more…]

Geo-Poetic Spaces: Inside The Box

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Before object permanence
awakened memory
the cardboard box
gathered dust in a cupboard
inside our family home

Blunt scissors
were the only tool required
to cut through through
layers of masking tape
and unify parallel universes   [Read more…]

Geo-Poetic Spaces: White Lies

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Before
we throw
the white elephant
out of our white house
we should ask ourselves
why we’ve listened to white trash
for so long?

Did we use the white noise
to whiteout
black eyes?   [Read more…]

The Ballad of DJT

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By P. Staley

A tweeter named Donnie was mad.
He ended each message with “sad.”
When asked who he hated
he huffed and berated:
“If you dare question me then you’re bad.”

A golfer named Donnie did tweet,
“Another tough round I won – sweet!”   [Read more…]

Geo-Poetic Spaces : Betrayal

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The emperor
golfs
while Puerto Rico drowns

Behind democracy’s locked door
senators write off tyranny with silence
in order to inflate the pockets
of power brokers
by breaking the working poor   [Read more…]

Geo-Poetic Spaces : My Drowning Daughter

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What do I say to the daughter
I’m leaving underwater?
“Forgive me,
For failing to stop the flood?”

I could tell her how
numbers were valued over words
and poetry lost
ears to mouths
mixing metaphors with facts
for larger figures   [Read more…]

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