News Poetry: Dropping Mice
This morning I'll drop a mouse
into the poem as suggested by Billy Collins
and I will characterize a serpent
as suggested by somebody else.
The snake will...
News Poetry: Cinco de Mayo
Mexican flags floating
in an abyss of urban pollution.
Corona beer
gushing onto calles
like Noah’s flood
taquitos de barbacoa
musica del rancho
folklorico para los jovenes
el grito de dolores
muchos colores
of...
News Poetry: Make Shift
—on viewing a photograph by Hamza Al-Ajweh/AFP
Loveland Reporter-Herald, February 24, 2018
I thought it was a sculpture in progress,
clay, a commission, this figure of...
News Poetry: The Last Rhinoceros
I take my daughters to the zoo, to visit Sudan,
the northern white rhino, who exists, now,
only as a vial of frozen semen.
My youngest wants...
News Poetry: Small Town
They moved in
far to the edge of things
Kept to themselves
Nobody heard the screams
The scratchings
on the safety glass
A neighbor saw the two girls once
Their shyness...
News Poetry: A call to arms
Recess becomes a drill,
the schoolyard a parade ground
and the squad—
thirty first graders
in raggedy formation,
their uniforms not
uniformly neat.
The sergeant wears skinny jeans
and Uggs. No one salutes
but...
News Poetry: Seventeen lines for Parkland
After seventeen
Comes eighteen
And the students
Feel the strength
Of their years,
Armed with ballots
Not bullets.
Greedy geriatrics
Will be free
To golf every day
As a new generation
Nails their diplomas
On Washington’s...
News Poetry: Missing at the Table
In a time of national crisis, what our country really needs is a good poem.
—Herbert Hoover
This is the time when we must say...
News Poetry: Waking Dry
I woke up this morning
with a dry throat
& words of a poem about a dead river
rattling around in the bones of my skull-
word seeds,...
News Poetry: The Good Negro
Editor’s Note: Dr. Gregory Diggs wrote this poem in April 2015 when nationwide Black Lives Matter protests were occurring following the death of Freddie Gray...