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February 21, 2019
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Next Line, Please

Each Tuesday, our readers contribute a new line of verse—or a completed poem—in collaboration with a renowned poet.

Previous posts

This Was Glory, Too

by David Lehman | Tuesday, February 19, 2019

Stanzaic Choreography

by David Lehman | Tuesday, February 12, 2019

Doubling Down

by David Lehman | Tuesday, February 05, 2019

Beneath a Blood Wolf Moon

by David Lehman | Tuesday, January 29, 2019

The Expanse of Spirit

by David Lehman | Tuesday, January 22, 2019

Tributes to May in January

by David Lehman | Tuesday, January 15, 2019

Four-Word Lines

by David Lehman | Tuesday, January 08, 2019

An Ample Meal

by David Lehman | Tuesday, December 18, 2018

The Life of Words

by David Lehman | Tuesday, December 11, 2018

A Hole in One

by David Lehman | Tuesday, December 04, 2018
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THIS WEEK’S ARCHIVE PICK

School Survival

by Anne P. Beatty

As L.A. teachers prepare to go on strike, we’re revisiting an essay by Anne P. Beatty about her time teaching high school in South Central Los Angeles, where her homeroom class often paused for a moment of silence to mourn students who had died in drive-by shootings. Her students knew that this was not the case in wealthier school districts. “They knew that somewhere there were schools with computers that worked, just as they knew that somewhere it was safe to walk through the streets at night,” Beatty writes. “They knew it wasn’t normal for 16-year-olds to die.” But what she found shocking, her students had to learn to endure. “Apathy was involved in giving in to the violence, and there was despair over the prospect of a better future.”