Portside

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."

Whatever we do or think we do, whatever we believe or think we believe, whatever great changes occur in the world, writes the New Zealand poet Michelle Elvy, some things just go on as they have gone on.

The New York poet Mehrnoosh Torbatnejad offers a soulful Life Jacket to those displaced and forlorn by international tragedies: "remember," she writes, "you were born first/into a province of hope."

What is war? Jill McDonough’s alphabetical poem evolves from World War I’s soldier-oriented them vs. us to the hidden terrors of today’s warfare: CIA, NSA, Black Ops, ETC.