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News Poetry

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...