Three Poems
Brown Fields One by one by one, they take The hollow factories down. It gives The sons of sons of sons Of workers work to do. They don’t Just blast or bash the buildings all to pieces: The job is difficult and careful. First, the guts come out, and then The skin comes off, sheet-metal …
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Call for submissions
We’re looking for stories that cut through the noise — from people living the contradictions of this moment: layoffs and rent hikes, ICE raids and border patrol crackdowns, automation, strikes and small acts of defiance, survival and solidarity. If you’ve seen or lived something that speaks to how working-class people make sense of these times, …
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Whatever It Takes
it is a warm spring afternoonin the politically drunk 1950sin the little Virginia mill townstuck like a bird’s nestin the fork that splitsthe James and Appomattox riversboth rivers slapping their mouthstogether in a rough wet kisschurning and swirling the tidearound the high banks of City Pointinheriting their tidal swoon and swayfrom the inland Chesapeake Baythe …
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Morbid Curiosity: Reviewing Jarrod Shanahan’s Every Fire Needs a Little Bit of Help
I’ve been a fan of Jarrod Shanahan’s work, but only with his new essay collection Every Fire Needs a Little Bit of Help: A Decade of Rebellion, Reaction, and Morbid Symptoms, published by PM Press, did it occur to me just how long I’ve been reading him. Well, I guess it’s been a decade. I …
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Refinery Reflections
One night in March of 1983, I had dinner on the stove and was building a fire when the phone rang. It was the foreman Charlie from the ARCO Refinery at Cherry Point, Washington. I was living in Bellingham then, about thirty miles away, and supporting myself by painting houses and working the occasional shutdown …
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They Picked Up Each Other’s Children: Chicago’s Spontaneous Resistance
An interview with Kingsley Clarke on resistance against Trump’s War in Chicago. Hard Crackers: Earlier this week the National Guard and ICE were deployed to San Francisco, followed by a flurry of messages, alerts, and coordination as people tried to figure out what’s coming. As we know, the Trump administration has already called off the operation. …
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From the Archives
In the Eye of the Storm: A Report from Kenosha
What’s so simple in the moonlight by the morning never is. -Bright Eyes The night of the shooting, bands of armed white men dotted the landscape before we even arrived in Kenosha. Police roadblocks along I-94 barred easy access to the small Wisconsin city and forced us off the highway early, to hack it through …
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No Standing
Put aside justice, stability and security, the little creature comforts that we all deserve, or finally paying your bills without a knot twisting in your stomach—then maybe the greatest pleasure in landing a living wage job is getting to be generous with your money, no questions asked. For years before the pandemic, I joined some …
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