Looking Back / Looking Forward

By Paul R. Abramson

Déjà vu LA is a rock and roll tribute to artistry in Los Angeles, circa the mid-1960s to the early 1980s. There are, certainly, devotional elements and unabashed enthusiasms, but irony plays its hand as well, most notably in the chorus – so, so, so, LA. The intent of the song, however, is best understood as animated storytelling that has been shaped through the lens of racial, ethnic and sexual diversity. The multiplicity of references, for instance, are meant to eschew the boundaries that divide us, while also highlighting the mixture of artists in Los Angeles during those pivotal decades. Caravaggio notwithstanding, it’s not love that conquers all, but art instead, certainly to the extent to which American artists have risen above the cacophony of racial animus. This song now strives to highlight a few of those artists, while simultaneously giving airtime to some of our familiar tropes, Hollywood for example, Sunset boulevard and Malibu, too.

By Linda-Raven Woods

Strawberry Moon brought no thaw to Santee country   brought no thaw to the heart of Wowinapa, still haunted by the memory of the frozen Moon When the Deer Shed Their Horns   still remembering the blood   the screams   the cries of the innocent  the hangings   the bodies swinging stiff in a death wind   the stink of death like the stink of broken promises—“Let the Santees eat grass,” 

By Russell Willis

Do not forget the Greatest Generation

was bred as an isolationist mob

fearing all that washed ashore or crossed the line,

then turning in a generational heartbeat

to face and defeat a true threat

only then to tend to the foe as if somewhere

back in the day they shared a common relation,

transforming the energy of fear 

into a spark of innovative fervor, 

into a green revolution,

The third

in a series

of three visual poems

by J.I. Kleinberg

that

we have published.

Click

‘read more’

to see her poem

and more information

about her.

By Yuan Changming

1/ I vs 我: Denotations

The first person singular pronoun, or this very

Writing subject in English is I , an only-letter

Word, standing straight like a pole, always

Capitalized, but in Chinese, it is written with

Lucky seven strokes as 我 , with at least 108

Variations, all of which can be the object case

At the same time.

By Cheryl Caesar

“No One Is Coming to Save Us from Trump’s Racism,” wrote social critic Roxane Gay in early 2018. The then-President had just sneered publicly at certain countries, including the native land of Gay’s parents, Haiti, as “shitholes.” No one did. In 2020, reeling from Trump’s broadcast suggestions to inject bleach against the coronavirus, Gay reflected on the social inequalities that were only exacerbated by the pandemic. “Remember, No One Is Coming to Save Us,” she wrote. “Eventually, doctors will find a coronavirus vaccine, but black people will continue to wait, despite the futility of hope, for a cure for racism.”