Portside

“White hand on trigger/Black body on pavement”: Ohio poet Karen Hewitt speaks clearly, simply, one word, Rage.

California poet Jacki Rigoni responds to the phrase social distancing, just added to the dictionary in March, and how much we were doing without naming it.

Pete Seidman, Florida activist, has his own version of the moral arc of history.

Racist: takes a machine to know one? Poet Karen Skolfield parodies the obsession of skin color.

In a time when the murder of African Americans in plain sight terrifies the news, Poet Amaud Jamaul Johnson captures the feeling of capture.

Arizona-based poet Lollie Butler’s poetry captures the horrors of refugees crossing the Sonora desert.

“Even Andrew Cuomo finds time to call his mother,” explains Oregon poet Christine Hamm, addressing the emotional impact of the long quarantine.

The Paris-based poet Judith Mahoney Pasternak puts the story of David & Goliath into a contemporary un-Biblical perspective.

The Persian poet Majid Naficy draws on his memory of political terror to evoke present-day emotions caused by the virus.

California poet Jessica Cohn touches the early days of shelter-in-place “when hope was/a shell game.”