Portside

"Oral history we call it: I want his past, he hopes/ for my future." So poet/historian Peter Neil Carroll traces the story of a veteran of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade who fought the good fight, stuck to his principles to the end.

As part of the so-called second wave of feminism, Jeannette Ferrary’s “Negatives” captures a woman’s sense of awakening during the 1970s, much as women today raise their voices with renewed anger about male chauvinism.

From the beginning of a day, any day, writes Colorado poet Jared Smith, taking a continental view of people at work, we all go through “the motions” and “the same work has to start and be filled each day…”

Marsha de la O, a southern California poet, depicts most tenderly the hard wages of environmental pollution.

New Hampshire poet Jane Philips Meneghini writes eloquently of a war veteran's return “with pain and secrets.” Its title derives partly from a billboard seen outside Tyndall Air Force Base in Panama City, Fla., that boasted “Global Vigilance, Reach and Power for America.”

Tuesday is Election Day: the Iranian poet Behzad Molavi reminds us what to do.

Fresno poet Sara Borjas's poetry captures the imagination of an ordinary working man, ever hoping a windfall will land in his hands.

The full title of prize-winning poet Jane Hirshfield's poem, "Day Beginning with Seeing the International Space Station And a Full Moon Over the Gulf of Mexico and All its Invisible Fishes," reveals the contingency of the natural world and the human imprint upon it, for better and for worse.

Seattle poet Jed Myers speaks of the fear of strangers, how our eyes assess and judge newcomers, searching for the glimmer that makes them one of us.

"Whoever said a black woman/was always liberated/didn’t walk in my Mama’s heels," says southern California poet Angela Franklin, a poet active in the Social Justice movement.