Baron Wormser: Oona
When you have a dog, you get to participate in another creature’s being, a creature who wants to be with you, a human being.
Terry Blackhawk: So Here
So here I’ve gone and reframed your painting, the one of the street with its tilted telephone poles, the street that led me into sleep so often now bordered by an eggplant purple, very trendy and advised by the decorator to pick up the purples and greens of other pieces in my room…
Video: Jane Hirshfield reads “For What Binds Us” (with text included)
And when two people have loved each other
see how it is like a
scar between their bodies,
stronger, darker, and proud
Baron Wormser: Ghosts
All the chatter about “family values” presupposes that women pick up whatever difficulties they are faced with and go forward with a happy, maternal smile. Seduced and abandoned does not exist in such an aggressively wholesome universe.
Sandy Solomon: Abortion Clinic
Pregnant, but unclear about her last period,
she said she thought nothing was wrong for weeks,
but knew she couldn’t afford another, couldn’t
afford the five kids she had now
Baron Wormser: Conspiracy and Character
Not so strangely, the events of January 6 have a Roman cast to them as a vengeful, self-styled emperor urges the plebeians to attack the Capitol
Kathryn Levy: The Story of Apples
They peered at the apples
in the Apple Museum, or the half remembered
pictures of apples.
Michael Simms: Mary Jo and Aline
Mornings they loved best
sitting over long breakfast
light slanting over them
Ruth L. Schwartz: Love Letters from the Late Edge
two women, neither of us young, one of us frankly old,
walking our joy like a large animal
around a city lake
Michael Simms: Uvalde
The swelling and collapsing
Of a small promise more
Tentative than we knew
Baron Wormser: The Mythos of the Gun 
Beneath the easy-going, have-a-nice day American exterior is some serious anti-social feeling that does not wish anyone who is somehow different a nice day, that wishes them a bad day, a you-shouldn’t-exist day, an I-would-kill-you-if-I-could day.
Robert Bernard Hass: El Duende | On the Origins of Rafael Nadal’s Tennis Artistry
As Rafael Nadal attempts to win his unprecedented 14th French Open title, whether he wins or loses, we can rest assured that he will dazzle us with an athletic beauty that emerges from this ethos.
Baron Wormser: A Poetry Proposal
There is no shortage of poems and no shortage of strategies to deliver the poems. The failing lies in our wariness. It’s true: to embrace poetry is to embrace a degree of uncertainty. Yet what else is life?
Alison Luterman: At the Jeweler’s Tent
I hold a string of amethysts up to my collarbone.
There are wrinkles on my neck now,
rings of crinkled flesh like tree-markings,
one for each lived year
Vox Populi 