Portside

California poet John J. Brugaletta explains the silent magic of Houdini and why the public adores escape artists.

Idaho poet Alexandra Teague takes us back to a child’s innocent, albeit cloudy, view of the world (in contrast to its perverse current state.)

“Yet another story” of a black woman “getting shafted by white women” knocks the poet off her feet, literally, and she rises to the continuing struggle.

In this season of gay pride and the varieties of love, Walt Whitman speaks to us on the 200th anniversary of his birth.

The Lebanese American poet struggles to transcend a mother’s worry in a war-torn city, “your nightmare, a faint echo/of raging battles.”

California poet Alison Luterman moves the reader from the despair of the 2016 election to the longer passage “of empire and uprising,/ extinction and evolution….”

May 31, 2019, is the 200th birthday of the seminal American poet

“When a thought from the past fires the soul,” writes the poet Joseph Zaccardi of a wartime memory, “time is no more.” And yet it clings to the present.

New York poet John Paul Davis reflects on the multitude of political candidates, their promises, their lies.

Tanuja Wakefield, daughter of Indian immigrants, depicts the anguish and anger of being taunted for the color of her skin.