a. Driving Home from the Night Shift, Our Mother
Listens to Hank Williams’ “Lost Highway”
She cracks the window,
letting the cold air
slap her awake. Cranking
the radio, she sings
along as she leans
into the burn of …
Features
We are here now. Not where we said we would be. But also not where we never thought of. We are here. It is still unknown whether we will be on our way. Whether we will be tortured. But for …
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Let’s take a moment to talk about Nnamdi Odimegwu, whose father when he was alive was called Jonas Odimegwu—a man full of himself and full of life, who stayed mostly at home on weekdays, went out in the evenings to …
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Dear reader,
The places, the hosts, the students have all started to blur together, I have to admit. I want to remember, but that has become increasingly difficult, especially during the pandemic when talks all went virtual. All the Zooms …
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Anti-Elegy for the Trees
How tired I’ve grown of the trees their weeping
boughs, the musty slop of the leaves they discard, wanton, wet
on the ground their seedy fruit ripened into rancor
their stagnation that passes for
To a Friend Who Reads Poetry
for Muriel Rukeyser
She was so wonderful,
Large in every way,
Her voice out
Of that deep and ample chest,
Her eyes, steady
In an unsteadying way.
Large in spirit, a passion
Estella Deng wrapped herself in a sea-green scarf and began to doodle on the page of bullet points before her—the beginnings of a royal blue star. She detailed its countless rays, luminosities. Because that’s what you are, her inner …
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The son is in the parlor now, which the mother has begun to call the living room because they are alive after all, well, but for the father. As the boy slept upstairs, the mother and the father sometimes made …
Read MoreEarly on the morning of Saturday, April 19, 1969, in a heavy mist that would soon yield to freezing rain, five students in Cornell University’s Afro-American Society entered Willard Straight Hall, the school’s student union, through a back door left …
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