Blue Hair & Fortune Cookies

By Najah LaVerne

Can I get a fortune cookie?
I'll pay you $1, the homeless man said.
Why should this simple question startle the staff
of Panda Express, while making its patrons laugh?
2017 has revealed more women with blue hair
Than any other time in my more than 60 years.
I ponder: Is it magic,
Because "black lives matter,"
Or is it that politics are now flaming red?


Najah LaVerne Haqiqah is a writer and an International Poet Society’s second place winner (2008). She has published two chapbooks and she is currently completing her first full-length book of poem. She is a retired journalist and adjunct professor of English Composition. She volunteers as a docent for the Los Angeles Public Library and promotes Peace, Prayer and Forgiveness Day initiated in 2006 to inspire peace and forgiveness with regard to the September 11, 2001 attack on the USA.

A Prayer for Our Country

By George Clooney

I pray for my country.
I pray we can find more that unites us than divides us.
I pray that our leaders want to do the same.
I pray that young children like Tamir Rice can feel safe in their own neighborhood.
I pray for all of our children.
I pray for our police and our first responders.
I pray for the men and women of our armed forces.
I pray that dissent will always be protected in this great country.
I pray for a more perfect union
And when I pray, I kneel.

Days of Awe

By Alicia Ostriker


elul: psalm 27

we are told to say the following
every day for a month
in preparation for the days of awe:

you are my light my help
when I’m with you I’m not afraid
I want to live in your house

the enemies that chew my heart
the enemies that break my spine
I’m not afraid of them when I’m with you

all my life I have truly trusted you
save me from the liars
let me live in your house

***

rosh hashanah

the birthday of
the innocent earthling
and the day hagar and ishmael
found water in the desert

in memory of whom
mud staining our shoes
water flowing in handfuls
we sniff the smell of living dying things

reach into our pockets
for the bread that represents
our sins, toss it in, praying release
us, help us, forgive us

the river answers
by swallowing our crumbs

do our prayers travel upward
do they defy gravity
like rain splashed on the windshield
of a car speeding through storm

in ten days we will go hungrier
pray harder

***

yom kippur

we destroy we break we are broken
and this is the fast you have chosen
on rosh hashana it is written
on yom kippur it is sealed

who shall live and who shall die
which goat will have his throat cut
like an unlucky

spitting a red thread and which goat
will be sent alive to the pit where the crazies are
thread lightly tied around its neck

who will possess diamonds and pearls
and who will be killed
by an addicted lover

who shall voyage the web of the world
like an eagle, and who shall curl to sleep
over a steam grate like a worm

who shall be photographed and whose
face will disappear like smoke

this is the fast you have chosen, turn return
how to turn like leaves like a corner
what is our knowledge, what is our strength

I am like the stones people place on graves to make them a little heavier
such a stone says, in its oracular way, don’t come back or return only as grass
but it is tired of being a stone, it wishes to be open, it would like to be an egg

honeybees manufacture honey, a power station generates electricity
cotton plants extrude smooth fibre, and my cells secrete anger
my mind propagates envy, but repentance, prayer and good deeds

avert the stern decree, I am like a ramshackle house during a hurricane
struck by guilt waves and fear waves, the walls could collapse any time
but the foolish old woman who lives there refuses to leave

October 18, 2001

Today, driving to work, I had to stop
and wait while the MAX train
crossed in front of me, car after car
filled with people on their way to work.
I could see them, every face, every suit
and hairstyle, perfectly clear through the glass:
one lady in a lavendar skirt and coat was smiling.
Tears filled my eyes, by the time the train
passed I was crying. And that is what it has been
like walking through this city, going to work.
Yesterday, I glanced up at the tallest building
and tried to calculate the number that would be
inside, tried to imagine the hole it would leave
if it collapsed straight down.
Every day in the elevator
I look hard at the person next to me,
not the one I know, but the stranger I have yet
to meet, the one I never will, who could have
disappeared into melted steel and dust
lost to my world forever. Every airplane is ten
times louder than it should be, and has a strange,
eerie look, like a bullet shot from an oversized gun
pulled by a giant hand to hit something far away,
something close. When I breathe I remember
I could be taking in the powdery spores of death,
and not know. Each night I come home and think
about all the people I know who are far from me,
I think about what I would say, how I would say it,
and it is not much different than what I would have
said two months ago: death is only two steps away,
the world is small, anything might happen, I love you.


Written by Ariana Kramer on October 18, 2001

The Last Election

By John Haines

Suppose there are no returns,
and the candidates, one
by one, drop off in the polls,
as the voters turn away,
each to his inner persuasion.

The front runners, the dark horses,
begin to look elsewhere,
and even the President admits
he has nothing new to say;
it is best to be silent now.

No more conventions, no donors,
no more hats in the ring;
no ghost-written speeches,
no promises we always knew
were never meant to be kept.

And something like the truth,
or what we know by that name -
that for which no corporate
sponsor was ever offered -
takes hold in the public mind.

Each subdued and thoughtful
citizen closes his door, turns
off the news.  He opens a book
speaks quietly to his children,
begins to live once more.

The President Elect

By Norman Stock

I wake to hear the latest news
Trump’s adviser dislikes Jews
should I take cover, should I run
will I be under the gun
with Donald Trump it's hard to say
he keeps changing every day
first he’s in a Twitter war
then he’s talking to Al Gore
and  gets a phone call from Taiwan
is he taking China on
or just kidding, what’s the deal
is this nincompoop for real
does he even have the guts
to straighten out, or is he nuts
are we facing the abyss
with this madman, or is this
like his campaign was, just a con
what the fuck is going on
whatever this election meant
it made him the president
as I said when it was done
holy shit, the bastard won

Pickled Dreams Naked, Buying Breakfast For My Kamikaze Pilot, winner of the Peregrine Smith Poetry Contest. His poems have appeared in The New Republic, College English  The New York Quarterly, Verse, The New England Review, Denver Quarterly, and many other magazines, as well as in anthologies and textbooks. The recipient of awards from the Writer’s Voice, Poets & Writers’ Maureen Egen Writers Exchange, the Bennington Writing Workshops, and the Tanne Foundation, he has also been a Bread Loaf fellow, a Sewanee scholar, and a finalist for Poet Laureate of Queens. Formerly the Acquisitions Librarian at Montclair State University, from which he retired  in 2005, he lives with his wife, Lydia Chang, a clinical psychotherapist, in Jackson Heights New York.

Hurricane Harvey

By Jeremy Rutledge

 If you want
to pray for Houston
you have to pray
in her way

pray like Beyoncé
when she was
at HSPVA
or Billy and Dusty
shooting pool
at Rudyard's

pray like you're
sitting over soup
at Spanish Flowers
or pho at Mai's
steaming your glasses

pray like the kids
playing soccer
on the east side
or mutton busting
at the livestock show

pray like the runners
in Memorial Park
lacing them up
or the researchers
in the medical center
looking into microscopes

if you want
to pray for Houston
you have to pray
as quietly as
the Rothko Chapel
or Houston Zen Center

and you have to pray
as loudly as
the old scoreboard
at the Astrodome
after a José Cruz
home run

you have to pray
sitting under
a live oak tree
or standing next to
an azalea bloom
while your skin
clams in the heat

if you want to pray
for Houston
you have to pray
without pretense
this ain't Dallas
and in a neighborly way
as friends come out
to check on each other
in the rain
and those
who are far away
watch screens
and wipe our eyes

if you want to pray
for Houston
raise a bottle of Shiner
to the gray sky
and say that 130 mile an hour winds
and 9 trillion gallons of rain
are no match
for a city of such life
and diversity

you can fill up our bayou
but you will never rain
on our parade

Seeing the eclipse in Maine

By Robert Bly

It started about noon. On top of Mount Batte,
We were all exclaiming. Someone had a cardboard
And a pin, and we all cried out when the sun
Appeared in tiny form on the notebook cover.

It was hard to believe. The high school teacher
We’d met called it a pinhole camera,
People in the Renaissance loved to do that.
And when the moon had passed partly through

We saw on a rock underneath a fir tree,
Dozens of crescents—made the same way—
Thousands! Even our straw hats produced
A few as we moved them over the bare granite.

We shared chocolate, and one man from Maine
Told a joke. Suns were everywhere—at our feet.

An Oregon Message

By William Stafford

When we first moved here, pulled
the trees in around us, curled
our backs to the wind, no one
had ever hit the moon—no one.
Now our trees are safer than the stars,
and only other people's neglect
is our precious and abiding shell,
pierced by meteors, radar, and t he telephone.

From our snug place we shout
religiously for attention, in order to hide:
only silence or evasion will bring
dangerous notice, the hovering hawk
of the state, or the sudden quiet stare
and fatal estimate of an alerted neighbor.

This message we smuggle out in
its plain cover, to be opened
quietly: Friends everywhere—
we are alive! Those moon rockets
have missed millions of secret
places! Best wishes.

Burn this.

Sonnet 130

By William Shakespeare

 My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips’ red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damasked, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress when she walks treads on the ground.
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.

New Colossus (re-write)

By Stephen Colbert

Give me your wealthy, your rich, your huddled MBAs yearning to be tax-free.
Send these, the English-speaking, fully insured to me.
I lift my lamp beside the golden door and lift my leg upon your filthy poor.

P.S. No fatties, please.

The Trump Wall

By William Marr

Built at the border of our hearts

this wall of the 21st century will grow 

drawing nourishment from all dark corners

of human nature

to become the Great Wall

of America

Hold it!

are you trying to come in

or get out

William Marr has published volumes of poetry (two in English and the rest in his native Chinese language), 3 books of essays, several books of translations, and 10 eBooks. His most recent published work, Chicago Serenade, is a trilingual (Chinese/English/French) anthology of poems published in Paris in 2015. His poetry has been translated into more than ten languages and included in over one hundred anthologies.  Some of his poems are used in high school and college textbooks in Taiwan, China, England, and Germany.   He is a former president of the Illinois State Poetry Society and has received numerous honors, including several awards for his poetry and translations. His Website, The Art World of William Marr displays some of his literary and artistic works.

Prospective Immigrants Please Note

By Adrienne Rich

Either you will
go through this door
or you will not go through.

If you go through
there is always the risk
of remembering your name.

Things look at you doubly
and you must look back
and let them happen.

If you do not go through
it is possible
to live worthily

to maintain your attitudes
to hold your position
to die bravely

but much will blind you,
much will evade you,
at what cost who knows?

The door itself
makes no promises.
It is only a door.

Courage

By Anne Sexton

It is in the small things we see it.
The child's first step,
as awesome as an earthquake.
The first time you rode a bike,
wallowing up the sidewalk.
The first spanking when your heart
went on a journey all alone.
When they called you crybaby
or poor or fatty or crazy,
and made you into an alien.
You drank their acid,
and concealed it.

Later,
if you faced the death of bombs and bullets,
you did not do it with a banner,
you did it with only a hat to
cover your heart.
You did not fondle the weakness inside you,
though it was there.
Your courage was a small coal
that you kept swallowing.
If your buddy saved you
and died himself in so doing,
then his courage was not courage,
it was love; love as simple as shaving soap.

Later,
if you have endured a great despair,
then you did it alone,
getting a transfusion from the fire,
picking the scabs off our heart,
then wringing it out like a sock.
Next, my kinsman, you powdered your sorrow,
you gave it a back rub
and then you covered it with a blanket
and after it had slept a while
it woke to the wings of the roses
and was transformed.

Later,
when you face old age and its natural conclusion
your courage will still be shown in the little ways,
each spring will be a sword you'll sharpen,
those you love will live in a fever of love,
and you'll bargain with the calendar
and at the last moment
when death opens the back door
you'll put on your carpet slippers
and stride out.

Our Son Swears He Has 102 Gallons of Water in His Body

By Naomi Shihab Nye

Somewhere a mistaken word distorts the sum:
divide becomes multiply so he’d wrestle his parents
who defy what he insists. I did the problem
and my teacher said I was right!
Light strokes the dashboard.
We are years away from its source.
Remember that jug of milk?
No way you’re carrying one hundred of those!
But he knows. He always knows. We’re idiots
without worksheets to back us up. His mother never remembers
what a megabyte means and his dad fainted on an airplane once
and smashed his head on the drinks cart. We’re nice but we’re
not always smart. It’s the fact you live with, having parents.
Later in a calmer moment his dad recalculates
the sum and it comes out true.
Instead of carrying giant waterfalls inside,
we’re streams, sweet pools, something to dip into
with an old metal cup, like the one we took camping,
that nobody could break.

A Safe Place

By Nikki Grimes

Dream killers daily stalk the streets of you and I 

travel, trying to trip us up, but we can give them the slip. I have 

learned to protect my heart-songs. I keep them wrapped

in the well wishes of  my  family, the encouragement of my

truest friends. Sometimes, using pen and ink, I anchor my dreams

and let them sink in the margins of a diary. Or, maybe I slide them in

a smooth sandalwood box buried beneath my bed. But a 

dream called impossible?  That I tuck between the silken

folds of my private thought - tough as steel, thing as cloth. 

For a Poet

By Countee Cullen

I have wrapped my dreams in a silken cloth,
And laid them away in a box of gold;
Where long will cling the lips of the moth,
I have wrapped my dreams in a silken cloth;
I hide no hate; I am not even wroth
Who found the earth's breath so keen and cold;
I have wrapped my dreams in a silken cloth,
And laid them away in a box of gold.

Autism Screening Questionnaire — Speech and Language Delay

By Octavio De La Paz

1. Did your child lose acquired speech?

A fount and then silence. A none. An ellipse

between — his breath through

the seams of our windows. Whistle

of days. Impossible bowl of a mouth — 

the open cupboard, vowels

rounded up and swept under the rug.

2. Does your child produce unusual noises or infantile squeals?

He’d coo and we’d coo back. The sound

passed back and forth between us like a ball.

Or later, an astral voice. Some vibrato

under the surface of us. The burst upon — 

burn of strings rubbed

in a flourish. His exhausted face.

3. Is your child’s voice louder than required?

In an enclosure or a cave it is difficult to gauge

one’s volume. The proscenium of the world.

All the rooms we speak of are dark places. Because

he cannot see his mouth, he cannot imagine

4. Does your child speak frequent gibberish or jargon?

To my ears it is a language. Every sound

a system: the sound for dog or boy. The moan

in his throat for water — that of a man with thirst.

The dilapidated ladder that makes a sentence

a sentence. This plosive is a verb. This liquid

a want. We make symbols of his noise.

5. Does your child have difficulty understanding basic things (“just can’t get it”)?

Against the backdrop of the tree he looks so small.

6. Does your child pull you around when he wants something?

By the sleeve. By the shirttail. His light touch

hopscotching against my skin like sparrows.

An insistence muscled and muscled again.

7. Does your child have difficulty expressing his needs or desires using gestures?

Red-faced in the kitchen and in the bedroom

and the yellow light touches his eyes

which are open but not there. His eyes

rest in their narrow boat dream and the canals

are wide dividing this side from this side.

8. Is there no spontaneous initiation of speech or 
communication from your child?

When called he eases out of his body.

His god is not our words nor is it

the words from his lips. It is entirely body.

So when he comes to us and looks we know

there are beyond us impossible cylinders

where meaning lives.

9. Does your child repeat heard words, parts of words, or tv commercials?

The mind circles the mind in the arena, far in — far in

where the consonants touch and where the round

chorus flaunts its iambs in a metronomic trot. Humming

to himself in warm and jugular songs.

10. Does your child use repetitive language (same word or phrase over and over)?

A pocket in his brain worries its ball of lint.

A word clicks into its groove and stammers

along its track, Dopplering like a car with its windows

rolled down and the one top hit of the summer

angles its way into his brain.

11. Does your child have difficulty sustaining a 
conversation?

We could be anywhere, then the navel of the red moon

drops its fruit. His world. This stained world drips its honey

into our mouths. Our words stolen from his malingering afternoon.

12. Does your child use monotonous speech or wrong pausing?

When the air is true and simple, we can watch him tremble

for an hour, plucking his meaning from a handful of utterances

and then ascend into the terrible partition of speech.

13. Does your child speak the same to kids, adults, or objects (can’t differentiate)?

Because a reference needs a frame: we are mother and father

and child with a world of time to be understood. The car radio

plays its one song. The song, therefore, is important.

It must be intoned at a rigorous time. Because rigor

is important and because the self insists on constant vigils.

14. Does your child use language inappropriately (wrong words or phrases)?

Always, and he insists on the incorrect forms.

The wrong word takes every form for love — 

the good tree leans into the pond,

the gray dog’s ribs show, the memory

bound to the window, and the promise of the radio

playing its song on the hour. Every wrong form

is a form which represents us in our losses,

if it takes us another world to understand.

This poem was previously published in Poetry Magazine in July/August 2017.

I Hear America Singing

By Walt Whitman

I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear, 

Those of mechanics, each one singing his as it should be blithe and strong, 

The carpenter singing his as he measures his plank or beam, 

The mason singing his as he makes ready for work, or leaves off work, 

The boatman singing what belongs to him in his boat, the deckhand singing on the steamboat deck, 

The shoemaker singing as he sits on his bench, the hatter singing as he stands, 

The wood-cutter’s song, the ploughboy’s on his way in the morning, or at noon intermission or at sundown, 

The delicious singing of the mother, or of the young wife at work, or of the girl sewing or washing, 

Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else, 

The day what belongs to the day—at night the party of young fellows, robust, friendly, 

Singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs

Climate Change Theories After Another Surprise Snowstorm

By Adam Stone

I’m not really a summer guy

I like winter

I like winter because I like snow

I like snow like I like my men:

Deep

Untouched in photographs

Shoveled off my porch before I go to work

I like my snow like I like my men

Accumulating softly while I sleep.

I like my men like I like my snow,

Which is to say
At the beginning of the season

I remember them fondly

But the minute they require me

 to do the least amount of work
I hope to never see one of those flakes again

I like my men like I like my snow
Light and fluffy at first

But heavier and more full of grit

the deeper you dig

I like my men like I like my snow

In theory

I like men

I like snow

I’m often judged harshly by those who don’t understand

My appreciation of either

And why do I like snow?
Is it in my genes?

Or do I like it because I was raised

in a climate where winter was tolerated

if not full accepted.

I like my men like I like my snow -

Oh god.  Temporary?

Just for a few months out of the year?

It’s been a long time since I lived anywhere temperate

So do I maybe like snow

Because I’ve spent over half my life identifying

As someone who likes snow?

No. I could never live in a climate lacking winter.

I tried that once in college

And again in my mid-twenties when I was

Chasing the mechanical rabbit of heteronormative success

That I was told would make me happy

But I like snow

I don’t always want to like snow

But I do always like snow

Even when it is inconvenient

Even when it keeps me from achieving something

That I believe I have the right to achieve

Even when it means the world is too cold to bear

Without protection.

Adam Stone is an amazing slam poet who lives in the Boston area.  You should hear his work any time you can.