Reassurance
by Barbara Eknoian

You left without a goodbye,
leaving a sticky residue
in my mind.
I’m wondering,
if given the chance,
what you might have said.
Honey, it’s been a nice ride,
but it’s time for me to go.
Maybe, I’ll see my folks,
get some answers,
and finally learn
what it was all about.

I’m waiting for a sign,
perhaps in a dream,
not like the one
that appeared when
you first left me:
You were singing
in your high school choir,
which made no sense,
since you always said
you had refused to join
when your music teacher
pulled you into his class
by your collar.

I am still waiting for you
to tell me
all that you might have said
about your romantic feelings
in our long marriage.
I am waiting to hear your voice
in a dream say,
I’d marry you again, Honey.

Previously published…

Single
by Kelley White

rain
yesterday I heard your footsteps on the porch
listened as you paused at my door
I took a breath;
you went away

lace
and I am still waiting, hungry
my hand kneaded the tension
off my brow,
too late, too empty

stitch
carry me home, carry me over
the hollow we made
by our laughter
in the snow

heart
sick, bitter, a muscle in a jar
twitch night and grimaced
the old man
at home

key
who is the angel
who left a shadow
behind
the window shade

box
a child is crying; I may have to carry
that anger, that need, those eyes
that ask me
for time

hinge
break the desert with
a fountain, break the sun
with a rain
of song

leaf
and small, she is a lonely
mother, too many children
to bind
in her silk

drawer
lower the window
take…

“As theatre directors go, Jerzy Grotowski is up there alongside such greats as Stanislavski, Artaud and Appia. A key figure in avant-garde theatre, during the 1960s and 70s he became known for his intense investigations into the nature of the relationship between actor and audience and for his experiments with the physical and spiritual aspects of theatre. Rather than confining himself to the traditional stage, Grotowski preferred non-traditional spaces such as buildings or rooms. Usually, the audience was seated within the action, becoming, in a way, a part of the performance. He called this ‘poor theatre’ – a performance which focuses more on the skill of the actor without the usual excess of traditional theatre such as costumes and detailed sets. Born in Rzeszów, southern Poland, on August 11, 1933, after finishing his acting studies at the State Higher School of Theatre in Kraków, Grotowski went to Moscow’s Lunacharsky Institute…

The Changing Light
by Burleigh Mutén

I am still waiting behind the hotel
even though you are    hours    late,
the sky already purpled     just
barely winking     a steady breeze
chilling my cheek

First your shoe will swing around
                              the corner, your leg
and smile, you      and your hat
will slide into view       you’ll glance
at your wristwatch            tuck your head
look over your glasses and          time
will fire the concierge
                                        our gaze
                                                   …

“The road movie has long since proven itself as one of the great American cultural forms, not least by capturing the imagination of other societies, no matter how distant or different. As New York Times critic A.O. Scott declares in the video above, ‘one of the finest road movies, and perhaps the purest of them all, is Monte Hellman’s Two-Lane Blacktop.’ In his original 1971 review of the film, a Roger Ebert described Hellman as ‘an American director whose work is much prized by the French, who have a knack for finding existential truths in movies we thought were Westerns.’ In some sense Two-Lane Blacktop is indeed a Western, but Hellman’s death earlier this week will prompt many to revisit the film and see that it’s also much more — as well as much less. Two-Lane Blacktop ostensibly tells the story of a cross-country race from New Mexico…

There is no return to normal. There is no going back to what there was before. You have to find new ways of going on. I could be talking about the pandemic here. Yes indeed. But I’m not. I’m actually talking about life post thesis.

I wrote something a long time ago about the post PhD slump. It’s a real thing. It doesn’t happen to everyone, but it is very common. The initial elation of finally reaching your doctoral goal is followed by an almighty anti-climax. Oh no. This is not what you expected.

Working out how to deal with the thesis shaped hole in your life takes time.I recently re-found some helpful writing about post thesis life and I thought it was worth passing on. It comes from Maria Piantanida and Noreen Garman‘s bookThe qualitative dissertation: a guide for students and faculty(2008). Piantanida and Garman…

Good Morning!

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Welcome to The Coffee Shop, just for you early risers
on Monday mornings. This is an Open Thread forum,
so if you have an off-topic opinion burning a hole in
your brainpan, feel free to add a comment.

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“No black woman writer in this culture can write ‘too much.’
Indeed, no woman writer can write ‘too much’. . . No woman
has ever written enough.”

– bell hooks

Howard Zinn (January 1, 2004) – “[A note of explanation: In the spring of 1967, my book Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal was published by Beacon Press. It was the first book on the war to call for immediate withdrawal, no conditions. Many liberals were saying: ‘Yes, we should leave Vietnam, but President Johnson can’t just do it; it would be very hard to explain to the American people.’ My response, in the last chapter of my book, was to write a speech for Lyndon Johnson, explaining to the American people why he was ordering the immediate evacuation of American armed forces from Vietnam. No, Johnson did not make that speech, and the war went on. But I am undaunted, and willing to make my second attempt at speech writing. This time, I am writing a speech for whichever candidate emerges as Democratic Party nominee for President. My supposition is…

Belated Thanks to Lawrence Ferlinghetti
by David Bachner

During winter break my freshman year of college
I bought A Coney Island of the Mind.

Reading it, over and over, night after night,
I was carried into a whole new way

of seeing and feeling, a new way
of thinking about poetry.

And still she dances
dances still
and still she comes
at me
with breathing breasts
and secret lips
and (ah)
bright eyes…

In 1969, suffering a doomed graduate school stint
at Berkeley, I would escape across the Bay

to browse in Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Bookstore.
I could never summon up the nerve to approach

the store’s famous owner and thank him
for his book’s impact on me.

Then I thought of sending him a letter.
In the end, I did neither.

The volume I bought in 1962 remains, though,
shelved always close to my desk

to read whenever my…

“‘The possibilities that exist between two people, or among a group of people,’ Adrienne Rich wrote in her beautiful 1975 speech on lying and what truth really means, ‘are a kind of alchemy. They are the most interesting thing in life. The liar is someone who keeps losing sight of these possibilities.’ Nowhere is this liar’s loss of perspective more damaging to public life, human possibility, and our collective progress than in politics, where complex social, cultural, economic, and psychological forces conspire to make the assault on truth traumatic on a towering scale. Those forces are what Hannah Arendt (October 14, 1906–December 4, 1975), one of the most incisive thinkers of the past century, explores in a superb 1971 essay titled ‘Lying in Politics,’ written shortly after the release of the Pentagon Papers and later included in Crises of the Republic (public library) — a…