Portside

Marsha de la O, a southern California poet, depicts most tenderly the hard wages of environmental pollution.

Seattle poet Jed Myers speaks of the fear of strangers, how our eyes assess and judge newcomers, searching for the glimmer that makes them one of us.

Rosie Flores, a young Latina poet from Los Angeles, speaks to the cultural differences that surround daily life. “Roses are red and we are brown,” she writes, “…we didn’t cross the border the border crossed us.”

Southern California poet Julayne Elle explores the injustices of a US law involving the adoption of children from foreign countries who remain exposed to deportation.

Poet Wendy Drexler picks a single marking on a tunnel wall to celebrate the value a single aspect of someone’s labor.

For the Labor Day holiday, David Salner offers a poet’s glimpse of what it feels like not to be working while working a long shift at night.

The circus--as in Bread & Circus--is coming to town but as Oregon poet Amy Miller explains with brilliant clarity, it will not set you free.

Forget Colbert, Stewart, Woody Allen. Check out Berkeley, California's Jack Foley. Then do something.

This is a poem about abortion--the law versus the rights of women--by the poet Danielle DeTiberus. Here's why she wrote it: Currently, 25 states regulate that a woman undergo an ultrasound before having an abortion. In some cases, the doctor performing the ultrasound must narrate the procedure, following a script which the AMA has found to contain false and misleading information.

"Even if the sea does not swallow you," writes the poet Esther Kamkar (herself a migrant to North America) about the experience of migration, "your heart will be broken."