Portside

In this time of pipeline protests in the Dakotas, poet Carol Denney sings her lyrics of a familiar ecological catastrophe: “they tear through our mountains/they tear through our town/after the damage/they’re nowhere around.”

Poet Terry Adams lives in the house formerly occupied by the hipster Ken Kesey, famous for his novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and the influence of the latter on the former may give a clue for understanding the style and point of Adams’s poem dealing with the rights and wrongs of the universe.

On May 8, 2006, the South African Judge Willem van der Merwe ruled that ANC leader Jacob Zuma was not guilty of the rape of Fezekile Ntsukela Kuzwayo. Zuma did not deny having sex with her, but claimed since the victim wore a khanga, a wraparound cloth, she had “asked for it.” Here is her poetic response.

In this touching, unembellished poem, Kathleen Lynch introduces the domestic situation of two people aging differently: "the man who once wanted everything" and his wife who now "wants the world."

It's not easy to discover that a loved one holds views (prejudices) inimical to your own. The Carolina-based poet Dan Albergotti offers an exquisitely balanced portrait of what happens at such moments of discovery.

"Hamburger Hill," site of a notorious battle in May 1969 in Vietnam, in which American troops made daily frontal assaults on entrenched enemy positions, receiving grisly casualties and causing, for the first time, significant voices of mutiny. On the tenth day, they captured the hill. Then, since it had no military value, the troops were withdrawn. California poet Anne Cheilek succinctly captures the absurdity.

Seattle poet Jed Myers writes about "a man/who’d left his house in rubble, crossed a plain and then a sea, gone north without a plan,/now faced a razor wire fence..." It's a story of upheaval, a refugee, a stalemate, all too familiar this sad saga.

The Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, crushed by China's military forces, no longer attract much editorial space, but the protests for freedom and the massacre that followed linger in history and in the conscience of the California poet Patrick Daly.

To honor working-class women on this Labor Day weekend, Julie Demoff-Larson's poem addresses a hidden aspect of "necessary durability" women had to bring to their work.

This poem is about flowers. Or maybe not only about flowers. Or maybe not. But Cortney Lamar Charleston's poem will make you think twice or even more times if it's about flowers. Or not.