Coming This Month: Paper Snowflakes by Helen Losse

Paper Snowflakes  Poems by Helen Losse

Preorder at Southern Hum Press 

Next To the Great, Green Sea

I rose from my rest on the sandy shore,

next to the great, rolling sea.  The ocean

breeze felt as soft as my lover’s

eye-kiss.  The color of ocean was green.

. 

God’s greatest hope is a great, green earth—

a brother hugging a brother, a sister her

sister.   The sky held the cinema show,

Concerning Clouds.  One of the clouds told

the unedited story.  So it’s normal that

news about starvation unsettled me:

. 

The ugly facts:  a blotchy face, a bloated

belly.  Myriads of people.  Mushy-brown rice.

Black maggots, maybe.  Maybe.

Then why a rainbow came clearly informs.

.

Seven soft pastels over the water,

spilling onto the beach in concentric bands.

God-promised colors by the great, green sea

answer several questions I did not ask.

 

first punlished in Domicile

Wake Forest Professors Examine Issues of Race and Poverty

Two Wake Forest University sociology professors say that poverty and inequality are still alive and well in the deep South.

Angela Hattery and Earl Smith have just completed a study, Social Stratification in the New/Old South, that looks at U.S. Census data from counties in Mississippi and Alabama. They examined how poverty and other measures of well-being differ between counties depending on the race of the people who live there.

The study was inspired by a course that Hattery and Smith teach together that takes students from local universities on a tour of Southern states. The tour goes through major historical civil rights sites while letting the professors and students see what modern life is like in the deep South.

Continued in The Chronicle  (Click on article on front page)