Calling poets to a greater role in public life and fostering a national network of socially engaged poets.
By Nicholas SamarasWhat is that red throbbing over the sound of engines?
Why is a distant war still being talked about in the media?
I can't see my home or Iraq or the Middle East
outside this bowed rectangle of blue altitude.
By Kamilah Aisha MoonWhen you're gay in Dixie,
you're a clown of a desperate circus.
Sometimes the only way to be like daddy
By David Tomas MartinezIt's not water to wine to swallow harm,
though many of us have,
and changing the name
By Sheila BlackSheila Black reads "My Mission is to Surprise & Delight" at the 2014 Split This Rock Poetry Festival.
My daughter works in the Apple Store--the Help Center, open 24-7,
people from all fifty states, angry because their iPhones
malfunctioned or they don't know how to program their data
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 Jericho BrownThey said to say goodnight
And not goodbye, unplugged
The TV when it rained. They hid
By Remica L. BinghamThe weight of my parents,
the dawn of them;
my grandmother's lackluster
By Emily K. BrightIt is nearly midnight and I'm
scrubbing at the grout.
The dishes, washed,
By Samiya BashirBrother I don't either understand this
skipscrapple world that is--these
slick bubble cars zip feverish down
