Portside

San Francisco Poet Beau Beausoleil answers the mysterious question, why did Nancy Pelosi tear up the State of the Union speech?

Teacher and poet Anna Leigh Knowles is from Littleton, Colorado and knows a thing or two about guns and schools.

The southern California poet Gail Wronsky writes with pride (and pleasure and dignity) about her child who no longer passes as a binary daughter.

Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach wrote this poem in response to the presidential executive order changing the status of “Jew” from a religion or ethnicity to a nationality.

Hugh Martin’s poetry captures the interior agonies of US soldiers at war in Iraq.

The identity of an African American woman Callie, who was William Faulkner’s maid, is seen from different perspectives in Malcolm Tariq’s poem.

The Canadian poet Lynne Knight adds a feminist/ecological turn to Copernicus’s classical paradigm shift about the earth circling the sun.

California poet Buff Whitman-Bradley reminds us that some wars never end.

The great exiled Persian poet Majid Naficy exposes the continuing pain of Iranian people.

The poet MEH describes a classroom moment, someone hijacking “communal grief,” and a good teacher’s response.