Portside

Poet Mary Elise Bailey has studied and re-studied the rhetoric of 2016 presidential shopping. This selection is part of a longer work, Duct Tape.

The subject of Phyllis Klein’s poem is homelessness and a simple, albeit personal solution.

“A Syrian Epic,” by San Francisco poet Muhammad Umar J. Salimi, tells of what is lost and what can never be lost.

The award-winning poet Camille T. Dungy captures a specific, amazing moment when a stranger suddenly realizes the price of racism.

California poet Lee Rossi explores the impact of toppling old heroes, their myths, their monuments, their wrongs.

New York poet Philip Fried makes a diagnosis of brain damage to explain the body politic of a certain politician with orange hair.

“All blindness and much worse,” writes Illinois poet Joanne Diaz of the invisibility of Black life to oblivious white people.

The Grand Old Party, the poet Anthony Squiers reports, “it never really was about morality.” Go know.

“I am doing my best to not become a museum,” writes Native American poet Natalie Diaz of complexities of preserving her identity as a person among people.

Massachusetts poet Kathy Nilsson exposes feelings of alienation in the current state of the world: “I don’t recall being American, or even here.”