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THE POWER IS IN YOUR PULSE by Paula Coomer

Paula Coomer spent most of her childhood in the industrial Ohio River town of New Albany, Indiana. The daughter of more than two hundred years of Kentucky Appalachian farmers, she moved to the Pacific Northwest in 1978. She has been…

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GHOSTS OF OUR FORMER SELVES by Eric Chasalow

The songs comprising my October 2020 release, Ghosts of Our Former Selves, including the two presented here, were deliberately composed in a confessional mode. They form a forty-minute sonic memoir that draws on everything I have spent my six-plus decades…

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THE WITNESSES by Margarita Serafimova

Margarita Serafimova is the winner of the 2020 Tony Quagliano International Poetry Award and a 2020 Pushcart nominee. She has four collections in Bulgarian and a chapbook, A Surgery of A Star (Staring Problem Press). Her chapbook, En Tîm (Wilderness)…

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STANDING STILL by Hattie Myers

Psychoanalysis, art, and poetry make visible and expand the boundaries of our psychic reality and so the world. But what happens when those boundaries fracture? When we are on top of each other and oceans apart? When days merge and…

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SHELTER by Nan Cohen

Nan Cohen is the author of two books of poetry, Rope Bridge and Unfinished City. The recipient of a Stegner Fellowship, a Rona Jaffe Writer’s Award, and an NEA Literature Fellowship, she lives in Los Angeles and codirects the poetry…

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LETTERS FROM LOCKDOWN by Tiffany Chu

Last week, I dug up a box of my parents’ old letters. They were written before my parents were married, while my mom was still in Taiwan and an ocean away from my dad in the United States. A surprising…

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Letter from Pittsburgh by Miriam DeRiso

Yesterday, my phone rang early in the morning. The voice on the other end of the line whispered, with strain, “I’m sorry. I came home for spring break, and I won’t be returning to Pittsburgh for a while. I don’t…

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Letter from New York by Kate Muldowney

I thought I’d share some thoughts I wrote earlier today. By way of explanation, I started my career as a young social worker at the outset of the AIDS crisis in the United States. These weeks have so reminded me…

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Letter from Seattle by Adriana Prengler

In the Seattle suburbs (where I live), people stay at home, as in most cities in the world, except for outings for groceries, to the pharmacy, and for walks or biking on trails. My state (Washington State) has not officially…

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