What is Speculative Poetry?

Speculative poetry, ancient of days, older than the flood, the poetry of possibilities, centers the imagined as real. The first recorded human literature was speculative verse: Gilgamesh, the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, the Iliad and Odyssey, and Beowulf, are ancient exemplars.

Juneteenth is a celebration of Black freedom in America. It commemorates when enslaved people in Galveston, Texas learned they were freed from slavery in 1865, years after the Emancipation Proclamation.