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 Gretchen Primackand there was a dog, precisely the colors of autumn,
asleep between two trunks by the trail.
But it was a coyote, paws pink
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 Eduardo C. CorralAre the knees & elbows
the first knots
the dead untie?
By Franny ChoiHow'd you get so slice?
Razor pinch all flat-like? All puff
& sting? What's your allergy?
By Natalie DiazIn the Kashmir mountains,
my brother shot many men,
blew skulls from brown skins,
By Yusef KomunyakaaThanks for the tree
between me & a sniper's bullet.
I don't know what made the grass
By Naomi AyalaTwo blocks away
where yellow cabs
zip by without stopping
By Myra SklarewIn the mirror of infinite regress
go back. Go back to Vietnam. To a man
who can spot a trip wire fine as a hair,
By Reginald HarrisGet off here. This is a story you've
been told: these streets before the trash,
the rats, the crack-heads nodding to ghost