Andy Shallal's Op Ed in the Washington Post

The excerpt below is from a recent Opinion Column by Andy Shallal in the Washington Post. To read the full essay, click here:

Sure, raising taxes for this reason is in my self-interest. I'm a business owner in this city, and I want more customers to have money to spend at my restaurants. Having a city with a widening gulf of haves and have-nots simply doesn't bode well for my long-term business plans.

My personal stake in this doesn't end there. One of the proposals I support is raising the income tax on the top 5 percent of earners in the city. I fall into this category, and I'm happy to tell the D.C. Council that I'm not about to move to Bethesda or Fairfax if it takes this step. My family certainly isn't going to leave behind our friends, neighbors, doctors, etc., just because of a half-percentage increase on our income taxes. I love this city and want all its residents, not just a few, to prosper.

Photo of the Week: Mark Doty

This feature highlights a different photo each week from the 2 Split This Rock Festivals. For more photos from the last festival, check out Split This Rock's Flickr.



2008 Featured Poet Mark Doty reads at the 2008 Split This Rock Poetry Festival.

Photo Credit: Jill Brazel

Poem of the Week: Lee Sharkey

Eye

A rubber-coated metal bullet struck Ziad's eye during clashes in Bethlehem. . . . His eyeball fell in the palm of his hand and . . . he kept holding it till he reached the hospital. He thought they could put it back in.

-Muna Hamzeh, Refugees in Our Own Land



What do you do with an eye in the cup of your hand?

What do you see that you didn't?

What do you make of a sphere of jelly with fins of torn muscle?

What do your fingers impress on the rind?

Do you rush it to hospital, where a surgeon waits to fuse sight to vision?

Does the eye have a nationality? a history?

Does the eye have a user name?

Its own rubber bullet?

Where is the eye transcribed?

A little globe there and you are the keeper

Of the watery anteroom, the drink of clear glass

Dear eye

Once it lay snug in fat in its orbit

Once it saw as a child

Through humor a peppering of stars


-Lee Sharkey


From A Darker, Sweeter String, Off the Grid Press, 2008. Used by permission.


Lee Sharkey is the author most recently of A Darker Sweeter String (Off the Grid Press), of which Maine's Poet Laureate Betsy Sholl says, "If our dreams could edit the news (and sometimes our nightmares) these poems are how they'd wake us up to the urgency of our times." She is also the author of the book-length poem farmwife and To A Vanished World (both Puckerbrush Press), a poem sequence in response to Roman Vishniac's photographs of Eastern European Jewry in the years just preceding the Nazi Holocaust. She lives in rural Maine, teaches a writing workshop for adults with mental illness, and stands in a weekly peace vigil with Women in Black. She is the co-editor of the Beloit Poetry Journal, which published a chapbook of the work of Split This Rock poets for the first Split This Rock festival.

Sharkey appeared on the panel What Makes Effective Political Poetry? Editors' Perspectives during Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness 2010.

Please feel free to forward Split This Rock Poem-of-the-Week widely. We just ask you to include all of the information in this email, including this request. Thanks!

Split This Rock
www.splitthisrock.org
info@splitthisrock.org
202-787-5210

Kyndall Brown Wins Larry Neal Writers' Award

Kyndall Brown, a freshman at Duke Ellington High School was awarded First Place in the Larry Neal Writers' Award competition for Teen Poetry. Split This Rock is incredibly proud of Kyndall, who has been a part of the Split This Rock family since 2006 when her poem “When Is War Going to Stop?” was published in the special Wartime Issue of Beltway Poetry Quarterly.

Imaginary Pressures

Its seems clear
It sounds just right
Each row perfectly aligned
And spaced
Flawlessly decorated with
Personality and self expression
Lyrically flowing swift
And smooth
She’s swept away
It’s done and finally finished
That false sense of security
Slowly but surely
Falling into a bottomless
Pit of uncertainty
She eventually cracks
Under the burden of
Physical abuse and
Low self-esteem
She becomes transparent
One piece at a time
Almost but not completely
Wiped away
Lost to the insanity of
That white page and thePressure of her own insecurities
She’s trapped
Between blue lines and
Marginalized by red bars
She tries to escape
From that mental slavery
By hiding behind a mask
Of trivial rhythm and rhyme
Only to be swept into deception and disorder
Each verb, noun and predicate becoming
Lost in confusion and doubt
No longer able
To speak the truth
She’s tossed away
Like some unwanted trash
Imprisoned behind
Circular walls of desperation and indifference
There with
The other failures
Broken, scarred and wrinkled
She contemplates her own fate
And wonders if
She can ever be
Truly set free
Or will she forever
Be bound and tied
By the imaginary pressures
To be a perfect
Poetic Verse

Kyndall Brown
2009

Photo of the Week: Deanna Nikaido and Andrea Carter Brown

This feature highlights a different photo each week from the 2 Split This Rock Festivals. For more photos from the last festival, check out Split This Rock's Flickr.



Deanna Nikaido and Andrea Carter Brown at the 2008 Cento.

Regie Cabico at Poets and Writers Online

Check out this great video:

http://www.pw.org/content/regie_cabico_16

Poem of the Week: Lita Hooper

One Man’s Plea

........A Found Poem from www.newyorktimes.com 7/7/2007


Frederick Lake has been to prison
finished his time
convicted in 1989
now faces deportation to Jamaica
insisted innocent
I wasn’t in the country
applied for a pardon

On Monday, President Bush granted
clemency to Lewis Libby Jr.
Libby was about to go to prison
Bush declared the sentence severe
to his family

Mr. Lake is the father of children 8 and 9
has heart disease and diabetes
worked at night cleaning aircraft
ran a car repair business
Mr. Lake is asking for mercy
When is INS going to come for me?

May 18, 1989 a payroll company was robbed
by a short stocky man wearing an earring
Mr. Lake did not have a pierced ear
is close to 6 feet tall
produced airline tickets from Jamaica
a week before robbery.

His passport stamps matched. The truth
is swimming on top of the water
Prosecutors challenged
Grave inaccuracies
Son says
Are they going to put me in the casket with you?


-Lita Hooper

Used by permission.

Lita Hooper is a poet, playwright and educator. Her work has appeared in several anthologies, including Crux: Conversations in Words and Images from South Africa to South USA (2008) and Tempu Tumpu/walking Naked: African Women’s Poetic Self-portrait (2009). She is the author of two chapbooks, Legacy and Perspectives, and a critical biography, Art of Work: The Art and Work of Haki Madhubuti (2006) Her work has also been published in online and print journals and magazines, including poetrymidwest, Drumvoices Revue, Essence, The Drunken Boat, Reverie, and Pluck! Ms. Hooper's collection of poems, Thunder in Her Voice: The Journal of Sojourner Truth, was recently published by Willow Books (2010).

Hooper appeared on the Willow Books Reading panel during Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness 2010.

Please feel free to forward Split This Rock Poem-of-the-Week widely. We just ask you to include all of the information in this email, including this request. Thanks!

Split This Rock
www.splitthisrock.org
info@splitthisrock.org
202-787-5210