Portside

Bay Area poet Fred Norman, a dedicated pacifist in Veterans for Peace, died on December 30. His anti-war poetry lives on.

Oregon poet Angela Decker speaks calmly but insistently—“We see you”—to the “plague” of race murders.

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.