Nancy Krygowski: “Here’s a Partial List of Mass Shootings in the United States So Far This Year”
Here’s the full list of the people the murdered have kissed.
Here’s a pair of slippers made of birds’ beaks, ear plugs made of screams.
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer: The Prayers
I had not imagined drowning
was the way to reach the shore.
John Crowe Ransom: Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter
We looked among orchard trees and beyond
Where she took arms against her shadow,
Or harried unto the pond
The lazy geese
Baron Wormser: Against Hope
Hope gives us a margin for our industriousness that keeps inventing new purposes for new machines, an industriousness that often seems to be only making everything worse.
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer: Embracing the Mess
I like it best when the memories are everywhere—
and I stumble over the ghosts of wooden train tracks,
trip on the spot where you used to do push-ups
Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum: A Good Man
To this day, my sister and I wonder if Dad
Got it right. “Fear,” he explained years later,
“Is sometimes the only tool.”
Lasse Söderberg: For Tomas Tranströmer
You know the broken history of things,
the alchemy of stones, a world masked
in the blind light of God.
Laure-Anne Bosselaar: Infinitives
To dust it — not often enough. To stare at it — too often.
To never open it anymore. Keep his ashes hidden.
Barbara Hamby: Letter to a Lost Friend
There must be a Russian word to describe what has happened
between us, like ostyt, which can be used
for a cup of tea that is too hot, but after you walk to the next room,
and return, it is too cool
Michael Simms: The Horses
People loved her as they might love
A flag or a map or a story
Of a country of green pastures
And low stone walls
Baron Wormser: The Shuffle
Lost my soul in the shuffle.
Got a self instead.
Not a fair deal, not even-Steven,
Not Roger-dodger.
John Balaban: Anna Akhmatova Spends the Night on Miami Beach
What killed her was the talk, the empty eyes,
which made her long for the one person in ten thousand
who could say her name, who could take her home,
giving her a place between Auden and Apollinaire
Barbara Hamby: Ode on Dictionaries
A-bomb is how it begins with a big bang on page
one, a calculator of sorts whose centrifuge
begets bedouin, bamboozle, breakdance, and berserk,
one of my mother’s favorite words, hard knock
clerk of clichés that she is
Michael Simms: You Taught Me
you pointed
At the bubbles rising in the pitcher
Of beer to explain consciousness
Which was blurred by that time
Of evening
Vox Populi 