Friday, April 22, 2022. Photo by Emilio Morenatti
Chernihiv
The caption reads, Firefighter takes a break
He sits on a swing, only thing upright
after the bombing. Hands clasped in his lap.
Poetry & Fiction
The Depp Heard Trial
She fears abandonment, his mom abused him.
Love twists into bitter repetition.
There’s always a deeper layer of pain,
a wound beneath the urge to hurt.
Self-Portrait March 2022
Warring nations mingle in my blood –
Russia, Germany, Ukraine, all the great-
great somebodies who boarded ships
pulled toward America’s promise-paved streets.
Their passports all stamped Jew.
In Praise of Secular Jewish American Lyric Commentary: Why Bob Dylan and Louise Glück are 21st Century Nobel Laureates
Seven decades after what Benjamin Schreier calls, “the dominant event of Jewish American literary history,” which is the “‘breakthrough’ – the irruption in the 1950s of Jewish American writers like Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, and Grace Paley into the heart of American cultural scene,” two Jewish American lyricists have received the Nobel Prize for Literature in a span of four years: Bob Dylan (born Robert Allen Zimmerman in Duluth, Minnesota in 1941) in 2016 and Louise Glück (born in New York City in 1943 and raised on Long Island) in 2020 (Schreier, 2).
Grace and Gravity
Klay Day.
New York Ghazal
Immigrants, artists, tycoons seek New York.
Bloodstains from aborted dreams streak New York.
To friends from elsewhere, even the name awes.
Their eyes widen when I speak of New York.
Fickle city, we moth-fly toward your light.
You bless the rich, feed on the weak. New York
Reverse Ghazal
(for B.)
Secrets that lips hold back, the body shows.
Be gone, Sun. In moonlight, the body glows.
Rittenhouse sobs he shot in self-defense.
Entry wound in the back, the body knows
Poetic Payback
Martín Espada’s Floaters has won a National Book Award. What follows are poems from the book — along with an intro and a few echoes — originally posted here last spring.
National Ghazal
Teacher back home, maid in America.
He sold tusks and jade in America.
The Past Is A Grotesque Animal
Excerpt from the unpublished novel Dzhokhar Tsarnaev I Love You.
After a few years of silence, R began to receive death threats again from Kaveesha, the Berkeley ultraleftist child of Tamil Tigers. He sent her memes of Mayo jars to remind her she was white. This is just sad, R said. If he were getting to some real deep cruel shit, I would be into it. (She was an extreme emotional masochist).
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Then he started sending her love poems by Faiz Ahmad Faiz. He didn’t stop sending her death threats. She asked me to write a response to his ludicrous, dangerous, manic emails. I told her my days of ghostwriting for her were over. (No more eulogies, elegies, birthday wishes, love letters, etc. You’ll have to write your own suicide note, I told her. We all have to write our own suicide notes, at the end of the day.)
Slumbering Ghazal
Skipping down childhood’s street in a dream.
Two teams of angels compete in a dream.
Bodies (Two Poems by Alison Stone)
Doing Yoga, I Think About Simone Biles And My Nonbinary Child