Isolation Scenes IV By Doug Sparks One: While driving the backroads of Groton, I waited for a turkey vulture to clear the road. He had been eating the guts of a turtle, whose shell was shimmering in the sun’s radiance. The vulture flew to the top of a nearby tree…
Haverhill Student Protests/CSN&Y (1970) By Mike McCormick My mind swirled as I drove to Haverhill High School one early May morning in 1970. The day before, a group of classmates had begun protesting President Nixon’s April 30 decision to expand the Vietnam War into Cambodia. Another set of classmates, including…
Michael Casey’s latest book is There It Is: New & Selected Poems, which is available at loompress.com or amazon.com. He lives in the Merrimack Valley of Massachusetts. Remembrance . a pretty girl on my street wanted to be a writer and was taking home economic courses because women are not…
Diary in the Time of Coronavirus (5) by Paul Hudon *10th May River hawk glides into view, low-flying, heading west. Spirit lifting visual context. Escape. *11th May When Death is roaming the streets of your city, can God thinking be far behind? God, the paramour, the paradox, the paradigm of…
Joseph Pauletto grew up in the northern suburbs of Chicago before studying journalism at Boston University. His writing includes music criticism, as well as literary research and journalism. In high school, he was the station manager of WGBK radio, ran varsity track and cross country, and played jazz guitar. A…
Michael Edema Leary-Owhin is the author of Exploring the Production of Urban Space: international comparisons of three post-industrial cities (University of Chicago Press, 2016), a study of Lowell; Manchester, England; and a section of Vancouver, Canada. A pdf is available here. Michael sent us a recent set of 40 photographs…
Historian Paul Hudon sent his fourth week of diary entries during the virus crisis. Along with him we are all feeling “the world is too much with us” (nod to Wordsworth) with this long-running health catastrophe. Making sense of this new condition takes all our wits. Late in the week…
Magnesium Nights and Hummingbird Mornings (Isolation Scenes III) By Doug Sparks One: Landlines On Thursday night, I got a call from my mother’s assisted living facility. She is running a fever, I was told. They are testing her, again. My mom has had dementia for over a decade. When it…
Ill Wind by Jacquelyn Malone The wind whines wild and compulsive, spreading instability across the land. Shamelessly it contradicts itself, whipping—demented—in one direction, then reversing itself along an already trashed path. No one can forecast a steady state: the wind, a pompous blowhard, has no firm compass, diving into low…