Portside

With tongue in cheek, Kim Roberts explores the patriarchal origins of our Thanksgiving holiday.

The poet Clint Smith, born and raised in New Orleans, writes from a wistful perspective of the city “kept from becoming.”

The Alabama-based poet Ashley M. Jones has a thing or two to say about “redlining” (aka housing discrimination).

Poet and Army veteran Karen Skolfield sees sexual assault in the military that “no one takes…seriously.”

An encounter with the mutilated statue of a freed slave leads the California poet Joseph Zaccardi to consider the names of those left nameless.

With the great frustration of politics in our times, the poet Pauletta Hansel concedes that the worst thoughts inevitably, spontaneously, come to mind.

Mississippi poet Philip C. Kolin traces the evolution of his childhood neighborhood in Chicago that went from Czech to Hispanic.

“He does not represent us,” writes poet Marge Piercy about the misogynist Senator, but knows the “clichés that light up brains.”

Los Angeles poet Lynne Thompson traces the generation gap of the 1960s and the transition of naming from Negro to Black.

As the matter of gun control remains unresolved, the comments of poet Wendell Berry seem particularly relevant.