Alexis Rhone Fancher: Post Mortem
It’s the last time, I swear, except this time I mean it. The last time I mourn Kate so hard I don’t eat, unless you consider alcohol a meal. The last time I drive drunk the five miles to Chuck’s house, at midnight, despondent, disheveled, swigging Stoli…
Philip Levine: Red Dust
I do not believe in sorrow;
it is not American.
Michael Simms: Oh Darlin’
The intimacy
Of strangers is luminous, the way
We wish well for the man who lost
His car keys, the woman coming in
Out of the rain, the girl who missed
Her bus, the boy who stutters.
Yehuda Amichai: A Child is Something Else Again
A child is something else again. Wakes up
in the afternoon and in an instant he’s full of words,
in an instant he’s humming, in an instant warm,
instant light, instant darkness.
Donald Krieger: Hiroshima Haiku
memorial bridge
ahead and in my rearview
winged souls drift by
Tayve Neese: Blessing the Locusts
Let them, in their fixation,
make one song from a thousand bodies.
Laure-Anne Bosselaar: There was a Room in Antwerp
There was a room in Antwerp I loved so much
I never filled it with books, a bed, or a table.
It was alive with its own clarity
Audio: Wendell Berry reads ‘The Peace of Wild Things’
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be…
Dawn Potter: Confused Prayer
Faith is a tattered blanket in this age
of fear: a drape of old skin, soul’s girth
swelling with sugar-song, a late-stage
hymn soldering heaven to earth
Edna St. Vincent Millay: “Parisian Dream” by Charles Baudelaire
And, proud of what my art had done,
I viewed my painting, knew the great
Intoxicating monotone
Of marble, water, steel and slate.
Sandy Solomon: Lost, Departed, Late
In the Serengeti four elephants rest without heads,
bodies rising like boulders from the plain…
José Alcantara: Countertop
The granite comes all the way from India,
but when I look closely, I see nebulae.
Lauren Camp: Leather World, This Bird, This Sky
I came here from temporary
and perpetual rages—the whole sky
of wind. Secret birds
take the ruin of garden.
