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‘Man on a Cloisonné Vase’ By Tom Sexton When I was still a boy with two good legs, the emperor’s men snatched me from my parent’s yard and sent me to the distant frontier to fight. An old man now, I sit unnoticed by a small pond…
Read More »Broken Through The world has a compound fracture. We are a body in pain. Bone broken through skin in a vital part. My Boy Scout Handbook described first aid for this wound. End of a snapped white bone, ragged as a snapped pine branch. Bloody punctured flesh, the victim…
Read More »What does a poet do when the war is all over the news? He responds, she responds. Writers everywhere are responding to the horrific war in Ukraine, posting new work of their own and sharing poems by Ukrainian poets of today and the past. Artists of all kinds are telling…
Read More »Irish poet Alexander Fhionnuisce’s writing deals with the intersection of technology, alienation, and meaning in modern life. He was awarded University College Cork’s Patricia Coughlan award for his writing in 2017. His work is included in the anthology Atlantic Currents: Connecting Cork and Lowell (Loom Press, 2020). On Invasions (February…
Read More »Paul Tsongas (photo courtesy of the Paul Tsongas Congressional Papers, UMass Lowell Libraries) With our eyes on TV coverage of the Russian invasion of Ukraine today, I was reminded of past fighting by Russians under the USSR banner at the time in the cities and hills of Afghanistan. The Soviets…
Read More »Creamer’s Field Wildlife Refuge by Tom Sexton Beyond the wide fields planted with barley for the cranes, a speck of boreal forest with nature trails, wild strawberries, pale iris, seasonal marsh crossed by boardwalks now jumbled like pick-up sticks thrown down by a witless hand. The permafrost is melting.…
Read More »‘Love Me Do’ by John Wooding Web photo courtesy of Northantslive.news I had just made my first decade on the planet. A ten-year-old kid in a sad Midlands town. Northampton, like much of England in those days, was all monochrome, fading pubs, and forlorn shoe factories. Pretty soon…
Read More »Little John and the Sherwoods Rocked the House By Paul Marion “. . . the most exciting and memorable days of my teenage years . . . .”—David Arsenault When “Light My Fire” was number one nationwide in August 1967, the Summer of Love, the Doors played the Commodore Ballroom,…
Read More »A Catholic Schoolboy Discovers The Beatles (Haverhill, Mass., 1964) By Mike McCormick THE AIR CRACKLED as my fifth-grade classmates hung up their coats on the metal racks in the back of the room at St. James School. “Did you see Ringo’s rings?” “I love ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand!’” “Who’s…
Read More »It Needs Sweeping by Susan April On November 25, 1968, The Beatle’s double LP White Album was released. I was twelve, in eighth grade, and I had to have it. Wish I could say I had been swept into Beatlemania after watching their first Ed Sullivan Show appearance on February…
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