Portside

For Pagans and other Non-Christians, the holiday spirit can mean helping the hungry and homeless, and remember to wear a mask.

“We think what we can’t see can’t hurt us,” says poet Ann Hudson about environmental pollution. Think again.

What every driver dreads, a traffic stop, in the words of poet Pankaj Khemka comes to a peaceful end, a holiday gift.

Applying for welfare support, the poet Lucille Lang Day discovers a shifting identity—the anxious applicant, the gaudy outfit she wears, the mirror between.

California poet Jodi Hottel discovered her changing identity after her Japanese American family was shipped to an internment camp during World War II.

By silent agreement, I watch two women—one white, one black—honor a personal transaction.

Esther Kamkar writes political poetry indirectly, taking us back to the unforgettable images of the death of a child trying to cross the Rio Grande.

Minneapolis poet/lawyer Michel Steven Krug captures the uneasy mood of these political times, the degradation of democracy, its vulnerability.

Simon Baena’s homage to the Spanish Republic reflects the continuing grief of the lost anti-fascist cause of the 1930s.

The poet Andrew Hemmert finds himself “stationary and in a state of undress/ like a fountain statue” caught in a mess of environmental distress. How can a person move through this muddled world?