%1

For at least the twenty-five years I’ve coasted
the dry, arterial freeways of Michigan,
the same billboard has hovered over I-196.
In Christmas-red letters it reads: Believe
on the Lord Jesus and you shall be saved.
Every Friday I drink three beers and fling
myself upon my pillow, soft as the homely
belly of the Buddha. I arrange my debts
and assets like tempered glass nesting bowls
clouded with soap scum. Whoever
leases that sign year after year
would be disappointed to haul up in his net,

Why we’re capitalizing terms for racial identity

  It wasn’t nice,
  No, wasn’t nice,
To be called in the Garden by God.
  He called us once,
  He called us twice.
Was no answer a thing He thought odd?

  He must have known,
  We were His own,
He presumably knew what we did.
  Or was He stunned
  By what we’d done?
We refusedly shut up and hid.

At thirteen months Ben can say Ma Ma, Da Da
and Fa Fa, which he watches his father create

in a wood stove each day to heat their home.
Tonight Ben rocks beside the iron box chanting

Fa Fa as softly as flames draw light from paper,
then drops his head and charges to the kitchen

to point toward the range’s burners: Fa Fa.
When I tip a foiled pot of tulips

to his face, he finds no name for what lifts
his spirit: Aah Aah, his cheek, fingertips,

Joseph Ross’s poems are an elegy for the civil rights movement’s martyrs.

Robert Shetterly never planned to paint portraits. But as he describes it, quoting Terry Tempest Williams, he was filled with “sacred rage.” Everywhere he turned he heard voices lining up denial, lies, and hateful political maneuvering. Everywhere he turned he saw the denial of basic human rights for people with disabilities, the marginalization of LGBTQ communities, police brutality aimed at Black and Brown people, and a disregard for the guardians of the earth and sacred lands.

        Tainan, Taiwan, 1990

Lingering by the iron pump—
its handle a lazy S—
and the shards strewn about
among clover-leafed weeds,
the girl gestured her once-haunts
to the brown-haired foreign boy.
Pointed to yellowed houses
slipped slightly from old moorings,
lightly slapped the red
brick wall, the chipped
tiles of pomegranates
and glazed peaches. “Before,”
she said, “I lived here.”
Mute and sweating,
he stepped back, stepped back.

At St. Martin-in-the-Fields, we’re living through beautiful, nightmarish days.

The performances of his band, DDT, are like teach-ins.

What I throw out to those I love
  Returns unreached to me, to me.
Bow stubborn knees to God above?
  I do if prayer turns round to me.

Slow whirling in an empty sky,
  Whoosh whooshing almost soundlessly,
Sole focus of my ear and eye,
  It all comes back to me, to me.

Yet selfless love I’ve read about
  And once or twice I’ve even known.
A miracle, as it turns out:
  Him swapped out for my blood and bone.