“If the United States were a true democracy, Donald Trump would not have become President. In 2016, Trump lost the presidential election by 3 million votes. (Why Democrats have not been shouting this…

“I stood at the register, waving a crisp double sawbuck around like Legs Diamond, finally gaining the attention of a pretty young thing who, hypnotized by my air of self-assured panache, ran over,…

“The sky is always dark blue, trending towards lavender/when I remember and say—we should not go extinct,/and each time this knowledge arrives/like a silent taxi headlamp in the rain./This evening it comes in…

“I have never been so happy about, or riveted by, a presidential inauguration as I was on January 20, 2021. And I wasn’t the only one . . . er, thing . .…

“The thing is, we know nothing about death/Except what it is not. It is not pain,/Nor struggle. Stripped of need even for breath/Our bodies settle. Minerals do not strain;/Achievement and failure do not…

“Repeat after me—with radical empathy: I am a poor, old, disabled, Queer (or Lesbian, or Trans), uneducated, neurodivergent, undocumented, Muslim (or Jewish), Black woman, living in America. Repeat after me, until your empathy…

“Though horses started disappearing from America’s roads and fields about a century ago, Pegasus and Winnie are still kicking up their heels in English prose, poetry, and speech. Indeed, after studying the impact…

“The usefulness of fungi is, for us, a lucky biproduct of their own independent lifeways, and their constancy, resourcefulness, and apparent equitability are reminders that we are not as special as we think.…

“For such gifts, love (forgiving/their cost, and your digs at performers’ egos, and in hommage/to whatever shakes you wakeful at four a.m./on a May morning to gather a birdsong barrage)/I will bend my…

“We ate, drank, and sang sea shanties while savoring wines from Santorini and waters from Newark. It was so pleasant to be waited on hand and foot after being constrained at home for…