December 22, 2017
Diversity First
Inspired by Caroline Hagood’s brilliant blog about erasure poetry and the seven words banned to the Centers for Disease Control (“Banned Words and Erasure Poetry”), I’ve come up with a […]
December 22, 2017
Banned Words and Erasure Poetry
Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley, among many others, has called the Trump administration’s forbidding the CDC’s use of certain words and terms (transgender, diversity, fetus, vulnerable, entitlement, evidence-based, and science-based) Orwellian, in reference to George Orwell’s dystopian novel […]
December 17, 2017
Forbidden Words and the CDC
Remember when the forbidden words were George Carlin’s “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television”? They were—and are!—fun to say, and they come trippingly off the tongue: shit, piss, […]
December 11, 2017
A Condensed List of Things Men Have Said to Me in the Age of Trump
This past Friday, I run into an acquaintance at a grocery store. Earlier I’d woken up tired and aching; it seemed that my bronchitis had returned, or was not yet finished […]
September 8, 2017
Mix-Tape II: Through Neon Lens, Darkly
A month before Donald Trump won the election in 2016, Entropy Magazine ran poet and humorist Holly Burdorff’s experimental piece “What Spills Out When Torn in Two // Reality in […]
August 22, 2017
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a President Looking at an Eclipse
(1) In the eye of the eclipse, he sought the loyalty of Comey, the bears of Betsy DeVos, and the phantom tapping of his own phones. The sun: Anoint […]
June 15, 2017
How to Be an Artist
“Taxpayers should not be forced to pay for plays, paintings, pageants, and scholarly journals, regardless of the works’ attraction or merit. In the words of Citizens Against Government Waste, “actors, […]
March 22, 2017
On Sacred Spaces & Community: Jewish Poets Speak Out
November 29, 2016
In the Present How Can She Exist In Multitudes
Lately it appears the water has been waiting for us to keep trying to make it across. The rivers and trenches glossed with light know we are so relentless as […]
October 8, 2016
Order and Stability
I can’t help but notice the word “instability” getting used, in political writing, to refer to widespread and continued lawlessness, violence, rioting, and so on. A “stable” society is one […]
September 28, 2016
She Is That Thing from Another World (Part 1)
“Women have one of the great acts of all time. The smart ones act very feminine and needy, but inside they are real killers. The person who came up with […]