The United Martial Arts Academy on Branch Avenue is decorated with Muhammad Ali posters. Signs proclaim that “a black belt is a white belt who never gave up.” Sensei Tom Evans begins the kids’ class with a series of bows, warm ups, and stretches. The class comprises about fifteen kids, half of whom trail in late dragging sports bags almost as...

Rhode Island’s only landfill is located at the end of a rural road in Johnston, which, when I visited in early March, was lined with some truly filthy snow. The grounds of the Rhode Island Resource Recovery Corporation (RIRRC) are enormous and industrial. The landfill itself is surrounded by a tall barbed-wire fence, and its periphery is, in the winter, a...

At the beginning of the world, Camel did not want to work. Every time Horse or Dog or Ox would ask for help, Camel would moan, “Humph.” The djinn of the desert warned Camel: “I shouldn’t say that again if I were you.” But Camel humphed again. And so the genie puffed Camel’s back into a hump, letting him survive without...

Utopian ideals demanding an overhaul of society are more ably articulated than realistic calls for reform. If the large-scale protests that brought down the Berlin Wall sought democracy, civic freedom, and human rights, the most recent wave to rock the Balkan nations has been less idealistic than it has pragmatic. Like Occupy, and most contemporary protests, they have been negative in...

SMOOTH OPERATOR Some time ago, on a lonely Tuesday night, I walked into my local pub. It’s a place of solace, where lonely people go to drunkenly impart their troubles onto other lonely people. Anyone can partake if they know the protocol: Walking through the door, you pause, taking in the tepid smell of beer-soaked oak as the group turns to...

It’s hard to determine when a bubble begins to burst. It seems to grow until that very last instant. If you don’t think to look for it, it will go unseen. Blink and you will most certainly miss it. Pundits love to discuss the fall after we’ve already hit the ground. The exercise is bound up in hindsight. After financial ruin...

“Who are these who are like clouds?”      Languorous and melismatic, rising and falling, the resonant, deep voices of men begin Ordo Virtutum (“Play of the Virtues”) with this question. Written in the twelfth century by St. Hildegard of Bingen, abbess, seeress, and all-around renaissance woman (albeit, in the High Middle Ages), the play is possibly the earliest example of medieval...

Cranston’s Ward 6 has either 10,209 or 13,300 constituents, depending on how you’re counting heads. About 10,000 of its residents live in brick and vinyl-sided houses on suburban streets and cul-de-sacs. But over 3,000 of Ward 6’s residents live on Howard Avenue, in the same cluster of cement and brick behemoths surrounded by barbed wire: the Rhode Island Adult Correctional Institute...

here where wood statues of the old gods stand at the meeting of two rivers, withered and withering in wind and water. once proud, now they stare on a still, cloudy day, at their forms in silver mirror bay water.   a pilgrim comes from a land of car-flattened crows, decomposed coyote bones across black deserts where whale vertebrae and tern...

The MFA takes conceptual center stage of MFA vs. NYC, as it probably should. According to Poets and Writers (purveyors of the annual MFA Index, which ranks highand low-residency creative writing programs along such criteria as selectivity, student-faculty ratio, and funding opportunities), 120 new programs were founded within the first 30 months of the current decade—this versus 97 new programs founded...