Calling poets to a greater role in public life and fostering a national network of socially engaged poets.
By Denise BergmanShe is a neighbor a building away, we talk weather and potholes, exchange
names Mary same as her daughter or is she Marissa or Maria I was distracted
her nephew was chewing the leg of his doll and the day was disappearing before
By Richard BlancoAll of us as vital as the one light we move through,
the same light on blackboards with lessons for the day:
equations to solve, history to question, or atoms imagined,
By Sami MirandaPlease
(this is what my mama taught me to say
before I ask for anything)
By Kenji LiuSharp tenure of boots in this callow country
grown from open skulls. A raw harvest of bullet casings
arranged in a perfect ring around you,
By Patricia MonaghanThey were always taught that all guns were loaded.
It was a way, he said, to keep them safe.
Don't you notice, he said, how people get shot
By Pam UschukIf we shoot past one another
like asteroids on a collision course with Mars,
our tongues acidic with accusations
By Dan VeraThis is what is feared:
that flags do not nourish the blood,
that history is not glorious or truthful.
By Jacob RakovanThe bones cast in the field like seed corn grow nothing,
grow briars in the boarded gas stations
brown stalks ready for the fire.
By Melissa TuckeyA roadside bomb is planted in every chest
I was a pea sized fist in the dirt of a man
who had half your brains