Helge Torvund: The Hand
This poem contains
all the poems I have felt
moving inside me
but never wrote down
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer: You Belong
It’s not true our hearts are our own—
they’re symbiotic as meadows in spring.
The heart exists for who grows in it.
Alison Luterman: Snowy Plover
Their wild wheelings trace the shape
of wonder and grief moving inside us,
pewter, then platinum.
It goes away like that; it comes back.
It carves a black, moving river in the air.
George Yancy: Remember What Audre Lorde Told Us — The Oppressor Doesn’t Determine What’s True
To navigate these terrible times, we need Audre’s Lorde’s audacity: Protect the public sphere. Refuse to be silenced.
Barbara Crooker: The Vultures
Will we
recognize the bones of our constitution after they’ve been
picked clean, or will we be too baffled to recognize their white
gleaming?
Charles Davidson: Resistance
The time has come for massive nonviolent resistance.
Jane McCafferty: In the Winter of 2025
Who is making time for you/ who knows/ time is clay/can be shaped/ into bowls/ placed on wooden tables/ under sky/ that is impossible/ to love/
Barbara Hamby: Nose
Suddenly, I feel as if I have no nose, like Gogol’s Kovelev
riding around St. Petersburg looking for his proboscis.
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer: The Partners
After thirty years, she knows
he will speak with his mouth full.
He knows her stomach will gurgle
in the silence before they sleep.
Michael Simms: Thinking of the Rapture at Castriota Metals and Recycling
frying pans fence posts
whole bags of rusty nails
even shoes hanging by
the metal aglets
at the tips of their laces
Hildegard von Bingen: Vision 7, The Devil
Then I saw a burning light, as large and as high as a mountain, divided at its summit as if into many tongues.
José A. Alcántara: Eclipse
Some will be thrilled at your steady undoing,
others, bored, wishing the spectacle over,
still others will be distracted by the stars
blazing past you. But yours will be no quick plummet.
Robert Cording | Notes: August, 2020, Whidbey Island
Some days all of America—the whole messy idea of it—
seems to be right here, the military meeting
the idyllic so casually.
Sean Sexton: Lightening
Did I learn the wrong word or is this world indeed lessening
whether gradually or at once, and another lovely pine
of my familiar horizon assumed the sorrel countenance
of demise
