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The Calm About a blanket being held openA hand on the hemstitch of that flapAbout this feeling I will never feel againAbout this feeling you never felt sinceYou held the blanket, your arm, the whiffOf your armpit, the flesh of you whoNever wore clothes in bed, your nakednessFelt all the way through my travel clothesMy purse and my suitcase dropped in the hallAnd all the rushing, checkpoints, and rainFlying into the night like pinpoint lightsBlinking

Dear Readers, This morning, as I traipsed the mile or so from my apartment in Greenwich Village to our new office on the Lower East Side, the Missing Persons song “Words” popped into my brain. It starts with “Do you hear me? / Do you care?” and the chorus is “What are words for / when no one listens anymore.” Not to project epistemological profundity on an early-eighties pop song, but “Words” is about the

If you don’t know Alissa Quart’s poetry—and you definitely should—you may know her as the prose writer of Bootstrapped, Squeezed, and numerous other books about the economic struggles of ordinary Americans. (She’s also the executive director of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, founded by Barbara Ehrenreich, which supports journalism about low-income people.) Her poems here are in a different vein, but have the toughness, humor, and barely suppressed rage that marks her prose. I love