Poetry
Confession
In a siren voice the months are singing "Mood Indigo"
I must wash their aftertaste down with a quart of Lethe
for all the optimism I lost this winter. On shelves the
alphabetical friction of names irritates. I move letters
on the fridge, start a new work with "Every image is
a sun and you’re hot." Often it happens a patient will
announce he is going home, that he doesn’t like being old
and sick anymore. But at the first quiver of oncoming
doubt, after dumplings and beer at "Joe’s Shanghai,"
you can’t help but put the saw to my loftiest bough:
"We will climb no further." That’s when I retreat
like Keats to a balcony, splashing claret into an eyecup
of visionary charm, looking back at your posture and
haute command as you wrecked a kitchen for a sublime
risotto. Then slowly, as in a decade of Melvilles, I get
over the hump, like any miserable schlump.
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES
Facts of Winter
By Eugene OstashevskyAPRIL 2023 | Poetry
Eugene Ostashevsky is the author of, most recently, The Feeling Sonnets, a poetry collection about the effects of a non-native language on emotions, parenting, and identity.

Accra Shepp’s Radical Justice: Lifting Every Voice
By Lee Ann NormanJUNE 2022 | Art Books
The book brings together photographic portraits of people protesting in Zuccotti Park during the Occupy Wall Street movement in Lower Manhattan in 2011 and the racial justice protests across New York City throughout the summer of 2020, filling critical gaps in the narrative around the haves and have-nots.
William Corwin: Lethe-Wards
By Saul OstrowDEC 22–JAN 23 | ArtSeen
In 2021 on the occasion of his exhibition Green Ladder, I had written that artist William Corwins works are discursive, and recursive, while his subject-matter and contents are heterogeneous, interdisciplinary, and multi-cultural. Often Corwin is a time-traveler filling his sculptures with esoteric, mystical, and mundane knowledge from the past.
The Voice of America
By George GrellaMARCH 2022 | Music
We are, as unimaginable as it used to be, entering an era where Black musicians in classical music are conspicuous only for their abilities. Marian Anderson opened that door.