Inside Russia’s War on Dissent Katie Marie Davies From the streets to social media, speaking out is criminalized.
Not-So-Great Powers Rafia Zakaria A military power moves in to subjugate a smaller country—when have we seen that before?
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Critically Ill-equipped Ann Neumann The pandemic showed the dangers of understaffing at the nation's hospitals.
American Elegy Tawanda Mulalu I know no music for how a country should end. I no longer want to be pretty for you. Not even for myself. If I must watch you burn while performing my own arias, then I will watch you burn with my throat. If I must sing another world to live, then my tongue arrives earlier than the final star in this brief stretch of time called a self. In the classroom today, another child practices purring. On all fours, she crawls up to me and presses her hair and ears against my leg: and it is the truest thing to happen to my skin. I move back to scold her. She laughs. And I laugh with need. I needed you, America. I needed to speak another world into my lungs. This piercing instrument of my clavicles stretched towards sunrise—they sing for you my throat phlegming from tar to tongue, sing for you my lips brushing yours, burning and black.
Morning Dan Lau There is a neighbor drying the dishes in a wire rack each plate filed under another prong. Open. Filled. Open. Vacancy. In the next apartment, a pile of shells. The spirals exercised under the pressures of sand returns the hollow to a net of light. Above, each tarred shingle provides an understanding. Starlings drag their bodies through the sky and back again. Scatter then fall, collect like blood on the back of a razor thin telephone wire. Jars and empty brown bottles flood the space below the kitchen table. Within this, concealed the idea of drowning. Kiss the sea. We’ve created a body of permanent ice. In another room, shards of apples fill a metal bowl. Water is water because we can drink it.