—found in an interview with actor Levar Burton, who is African-American Listen: I’m gonna be honest with you. This is a practice I engage in every time I’m stopped by law enforcement. I’ve taught this to my son, now thirty-three, as part of my duty as a father to ensure he knows the kind of […]
Poetry
White Privilege: A Manifesto
No Oasis
by Michael Meyerhofer
My mother and I went to a music store one day when I was nine or ten, skipping school because of a nervous stomach. She’d promised to buy me the sheet music for Man of La Mancha because I’d heard it in a commercial, liked it, and my father who was teaching me free weights had placed […]
The Sickly Child
by Ed Makowski
During the First World WarEngland, like many countries,pursued emigrantsof adversarial nationsand placed them in internment camps. One German, while confined at Lancaster Castle, created a method to keep in shape despite confinement, which he named Contrology. The man had been a sickly child and kids made fun of his Greek name, calling him Pontius Pilate—Killer of […]
Recluse
by Melissa King Rogers
We were drawn to them the way kids crave adults who are not their parents, camp coaches we could carve out crushes on and not feel creepy. He was a grizzly, big hands, a mean spiral. He called the plays in pick-up football after Prayer Circle where they’d one-up each other for the roughest sack […]
Mockingbird
by Melissa King Rogers
At nineteen my former student jacks a car with a toy gun. Give me the keys! he says, but he carries her groceries in, unlocks her door—can’t leave her alone in the cold, she looks so scared. Not even an hour later he’s in handcuffs. He’ll get fifteen. Ten if they go easy, a soft judge. […]
Anna Greene
by Janet Joyner
Anna’s domain was the wash, which doesn’t sound like much, but took an entire empire of terrain. The back yard for The Pot, on its three legs, above The Fire, bordered by The Tubs. One each, in ascending order, depending on which bits of the cauldron’s stew went where after they all boiled away at their dirt […]
Quagmire
by Gary Fincke
Behind our house, a soft bog Digested things that died there. I tested it with my shoes, Expected hands upraised Or at least a riot of worms. Our nervous dog skittered As if she anticipated births. In that quagmire smother Was a sign of spring. The swamp, my father said, Was spreading, bleeding out From […]
Chianti
by Nancy P. Davenport
I found that bottle of chianti in the cabinet for cooking it’s nothing special— kind of cheap, actually I’ve spent the hour, the day, the week minutes ignoring that it’s in there seconds but here it is in front of me, the cork pushed in with the end of a knife because I threw away […]
Peas by Theodore Worozbyt
I can’t remember why “boomerang” brings me so painfully into my own sights. The medicine has stopped nothing, nor was it intended to. These twin jars of split peas, I boil them for days. They will not soften, as I do. I try to work up the nerve to listen to some music. Is it […]
Husks by Ivan Young
To understand the texture of sunlight she watches the gull dip its bill into the opened chamber of a crab. It mauls the meat into droplets, rich with rot and brine. She thinks of swimming to a sandbar as a girl, the corset of breath when the ocean floor dropped away, the burn in her […]
