By Ishmael von Heidrick-Barnes
If your car windows
didn’t automatically
roll up
Sorrento Valley’s rounded off hillsides
onto tinted glass
You might glimpse another city
through my windshield …
By Ishmael von Heidrick-Barnes
To bring
the two faces of January
together with honey and pears
To accept
the chirality of human brain chemistry
To humbly honor the distance … [Read more…]
By Ishmael von Heidrick-Barnes
Half a dozen nights
before Christmas
bank robbers
breaking into sound sleep
repossessing
cars
On the fourth eve
the owner:
A full-time single mother
working three part-time jobs
blocks a gargoyle truck
with baby dangling arms
pleads to headlights on high beam [Read more…]
by Source
By Christopher Zumski Finke / Yes!
All these things are true about Wonder Woman: She is a national treasure that the Smithsonian Institution named among its 101 Objects that Made America; she is a ’70s feminist icon; she is the product of a polyamorous household that participated in a sex cult.
Harvard historian Jill Lepore claims in her new book, The Secret History of Wonder Woman, that Wonder Woman is the “missing link in a chain of events that begins with the women’s suffrage campaigns of the 1910s and ends with the troubled place of feminism fully a century later.”
The hero and her alter ego, Diana Prince, were the products of the tumultuous women’s rights movements of the early 20th century. Here are 10 essential elements to understanding the history and legacy of Wonder Woman and the family from which she sprung. [Read more…]
by Jim Miller
By Jim Miller
As Christmas approaches along with the end of the year, it’s time to assess some of the best and the worst of 2014.
For those of you out there who just can’t jump on the “Buy Nothing Christmas” train, 2014 is a particularly good year to think about buying your friends and loved ones a book to stuff in their stocking.
This year saw the release of an unusual number of truly groundbreaking books that should inform serious intellectual discourse on the great issues of our day for years to come. So give the gift of knowledge rather than a shiny commodity fetish. [Read more…]
By Ishmael von Heidrick-Barnes
I won’t stop talking to myself
while: Money has the last
word
torture is up for debate
I’ll keep shooting propaganda
with poetry
until people kill guns … [Read more…]
By Ishmael von Heidrick-Barnes
How will we find our way
out of desert
when the Joshua Trees are gone?
No iconoclastic arms
reaching out of mountain passes no white flower
guiding Yucca Moths
to broken promise of land …
[Read more…]
By Ishmael von Heidrick-Barnes
See me hovering
above unnecessary spans
diving for petrified fish
in imaginary lakes?
I am older
but not as distant
as the lines of power
drawn between us …
[Read more…]
By Ishmael von Heidrick-Barnes
River
sees me reflecting
Currents
alter its sense of my self
I am held up by water’s memory [Read more…]
By Ishmael von Heidrick-Barnes
It’s Kristallnacht
whenever anger picks up a stone
and throws it
through a neighbor’s window
shattering glass
into blades
sparks slashed from rocks
adding fire to eternal flame
Whenever an Israeli settler
builds a house
on land stripped from Gaza
Zionism becomes Lebensraum
Yesterday’s Synagogue
is today’s Mosque
leveled by Sunni shock troops
using the latest wonder-weapons made in Amerika … [Read more…]
by At Large
By Emmanuel Ortiz
Ever since the war started,
One year ago today,
I have wanted to write an anti-war poem.
For each of the last 365 days
I have been trying to write
To voice my opinion
In opposition to this war.
But nothing has come out.
After five days of watching
And not watching
Bombs fall on Iraq
I thought I had it
When some white boy
During a soccer game
Told me to “go back to Baghdad”
And as my fists found his temples
In retaliation for the bombs that were obliterating theirs
I remember thinking to myself
Amidst the slow-motion home-movie haze
“This will make a great poem”
A poem about
How he mistook
Mesoamerica for Mesopotamia
Borinken for Babylon.
And why Baghdad
Instead of Brasilia, Beijing, Beirut, Bogotá, Bombay,
Even Bi-racialville U.S.A. [Read more…]
by Lori Saldaña
By Lori Saldaña
My students wear their battle scars
In their brains, on their skin, thru their 10 key dexterity
They enter the computer lab with aching hearts and minds, hand me a
Veterans Affair ID card in exchange for
A textbook, a software program, a few hours on the keyboard
I watch them, marveling at their resiliency … [Read more…]
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