On December 6, 2017, a coalition of women Democrats led by Senator Kirsten Gillibrand—Senators Kamala Harris, Claire McCaskill, Patty Murray, Mazie Hirono, Tammy Baldwin, and Maggie Hassan—demanded that Al Franken give up his senatorial seat as a result of sexual misconduct accusations from eight different women.1 One day later, Franken […]
Prelude: Victoria Santa Cruz Me Gritaron Negra! Negra Soy! They yelled at me: Black! Black I am. And black, here, is feminine, of necessity. They yelled at me, Black Woman; they called me Black Woman. Even the men in the film shout it, dance it, are swept up in its […]
As a poet and essayist, I think of poetry as creative heuristics, a means to investigate the world and experience through language, community, identity and politics. In poetry, writer and reader engage the contents of our categorical thinking, formally and informally (in custom and usage), as well as the limits, […]
“It is not a matter of governing; still less of being governed.” Marcel Havrenne Hannah Arendt reminds us that “…to the Greeks, private life seemed ‘idiotic’ because it lacked the diversity that comes with speaking about something and thus the experience of how things really function in the world” (Arendt […]
Though it would be hard to say in a single sentence, let me try to understand this: shortly before the holidays, Politico reported that a rogue band of Republican Congressmen had been convening under cover of darkness for several weeks in the shadow of the duly appointed bipartisan House investigative […]
Once as a girl, she dreamed an urban kingdom. In the time of the dream, women of the kingdom were squatting over toilets, over gold chamberpots. There was one man—he was understood as the king—in all the imagined city. And this “king” walked among the women and among the pots. […]
PART IV: VISIONS IN HISTORY This town’s edge, a collapsing shore, seems always to be where live the poor. In my mother’s time, they called us river rats,/ now the words mix insults/ of race, stones on our tongues we spit at others. * * * * * History’s latest […]
Among the rubble of our wounded nation the vibrant image of a lyric warrior haunts my fragile solitude, the canopy above his sleep after long years’ scribbling blank as silent centuries since departed. Plays and poems do not heal politics. A writer’s skyward reach, earthly guesswork’s intuition, gathers straw and […]
Banana Boat Moon And a hibiscus behind your ear like the exotically melancholy singer though you are a mad cap trickster who changes your birthday from hurricane time to June 11 on a spring whim in route to the place you claim to be born in it rolls off your […]
Increasingly, since the Supreme Court some thirty-plus years ago ruled to allow unlimited funding by private and corporate interests, the United States has steadily moved toward political degeneration and corrupting abuse of democracy’s frameworks. This issue stands at the forefront of any discussion regarding democracy’s present and future reality. I […]
The Myth of Sexual Violence as Only a Crime Against WomenOctober 24, 2018
The Present Order: A NoteAugust 30, 2018
Ballot Box Terror and The Impossibility of the Black VoteAugust 30, 2018
California, the Beautiful, Or, Why the Killing and Incarceration of African Americans Won’t Budge the BallotAugust 30, 2018