Carine Topal: The Terrible Years
Our son sits on a yellow bench bloodied
in the square, waving to a soldier. It is to you he says goodbye.
Now we must pack our bag of bread, head to toe in soot,
ready to eat anything.
Michael Simms: Serene Gorilla in a Cloud of Butterflies
Her name is Malui and she is walking through a cloud of butterflies she’s disturbed.
Stephen Dobyns: Prague
The day I learned my wife was dying
I told myself if anyone said, Well, she had
a good life, I’d punch him in the nose.
How much life represents a good life?
Kurt Brown: The Kiss
That kiss I failed to give you.
How can you forgive me?
Barbara Crooker: Patty’s Charcoal Drive-In
First job. In tight black shorts
and a white bowling shirt, red lipstick
and bouncing ponytail, I present
each overflowing tray as if it were a banquet.
Jane Mead: Passing a Truck Full of Chickens/at Night on Highway Eighty
I saw the one that made me slow some—
I lingered there beside her for five miles.
Ted Kooser: Abandoned Farmhouse
Something went wrong, says the empty house
in the weed-choked yard. Stones in the fields
say he was not a farmer; the still-sealed jars
in the cellar say she left in a nervous haste.
Barbara Hamby: Ode to Hardware Stores
Where have all the hardware stores gone—dusty, sixty-watt
warrens with wood floors, cracked linoleum,
poured concrete painted blood red?
Video: Let There Be Light (John Huston’s 1946 documentary about PTSD)
The film was intended to educate the public about post-traumatic stress disorder and its treatment among returning veterans, but its unscripted presentation of mental disability caused the U.S. government to suppress the film.
Michael Simms: Two Poems Inspired by Sean Sexton
Some people should be allowed to live forever
on the basis of our world’s great need. — Sean Sexton
Tony Hoagland: Sweet Ruin
Maybe that is what he was after,
my father, when he arranged, ten years ago,
to be discovered in a mobile home
with a woman named Roxanne, an attractive,
recently divorced masseuse.
James Crews: Light and Dark
Half-awake, I lose myself in a pool
of late morning sun and leaf-shadows
flashing on the floor outside my bedroom,
what the Japanese call komorebi—light
and dark held in the same container
of a single moment, as we hold them in us,
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer: Design
Whatever is sacred, I feel it in canyons,
these earthen temples to surrender—
such holy architecture
with their deep and ancient silence
Chris Hedges: The Martyrdom of Charlie Kirk
The assassination of Charlie Kirk presages a new, deadly stage in the disintegration of a fractious and highly polarized United States.
