Portside

The exiled Persian poet Majid Naficy draws on Christian parable (the Book of Matthew), suggesting that some of the irate voices on our streets are not enemies but prophets.

What's funny about drones? Nothing. The poet Jennifer L. Knox has a sense of humor. Also a sense of outrage. Seldom do these traits go so well together as in her poetry.

"The mothers are on their own," writes the poet/translator Kathleen Weaver in her homage to the women who courageously challenged dictatorships in Chile, Argentina, and elsewhere who had "disappeared" their children.

The English poet John Daniel provides a perfect Mother's Day memory of his hard-working Mum, Violet Daniel, who defied the usual expectations of mothering. Happy Mothers Day!

Milwaukee poet Phyllis Wax throws a cold eye on this year's election: her conclusion is chilling.

With a sharp eye for detail and an unrelenting instinct for trouble, Los Angeles poet Alexis Rhone Fancher presents the sad working woman behind the counter.

The Mexican-born Texas poet Hugo Esteban Rodriguez Castañeda suggests a Latino identity based on hardship, danger, fear, but also an enduring spirit of survival that is as indigenous as el huizache--the acacia tree--which also happens to be the name of "The Magazine of Latino Literature."

The Palestine poet Jehan Bseiso depicts the desperation of refugees, pushed from home by war--"barrel bombs and Kalashnikovs"--and lured toward a dubious safety by "a little bit of hope."

Martin Espada, “The Pablo Neruda of North American poets," according to Sandra Cisneros, turns his critical eye to the persistence of racist murders in our times.

The poet Martin Espada, called the North American Pablo Neruda, turns his eye to the continuing murders of non-white peoples and asks how people in the future will look back at our times, wondering "how we could have lived or died this way, how the descendants of slaves still fled and the descendants of slave-catchers still shot them."