Portside

Whatever we do or think we do, whatever we believe or think we believe, whatever great changes occur in the world, writes the New Zealand poet Michelle Elvy, some things just go on as they have gone on.

The New York poet Mehrnoosh Torbatnejad offers a soulful Life Jacket to those displaced and forlorn by international tragedies: "remember," she writes, "you were born first/into a province of hope."

With its surreal twist on death, birth, and reincarnation, the poet Philip St. Clair reminds us that some memories we don’t ever want to hear again.

A native of Chicago, the poet Philip C. Kolin laments how the City of Broad Shoulders has become a death trap for the young.

The late 1960s, a moment of awakening and consciousness raising, emerges in Sandra Anfang’s surprising poem about a good teacher and an eager student.

Stacey Walker’s astonishing lyric poem depicts the postwar trauma of an American veteran of the Iraq war and his wife, as the war lives on in their bed.

What is war? Jill McDonough’s alphabetical poem evolves from World War I’s soldier-oriented them vs. us to the hidden terrors of today’s warfare: CIA, NSA, Black Ops, ETC.

Amid “the caked-on lies” of our political leaders and corporate aggressors, New Zealand poet John Sweden offers no remedies, only an imagined hope.

Fifty-some years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, we are still waiting for the end--not necessary of the world, but the US embargo. Poet Peter Neil Carroll recalls an October day when Paul Simon, relatively unknown, sang for a class of nervous students at Queens College and how a young Cuban today looks back at that moment.

"a mirror/ if our eyes are strong enough," so the poet J. David Cummings evokes the death of children: at Hiroshima, on the Mediterranean today.