Chard deNiord: Open Letter to the President from a Citizen, August 21, 2019
I write to you, Mr. President, from inside
the cell in which you’ve locked the country
with ICE.
Sharon Fagan McDermott: This Against the Night
Sweet hyssop and the sweltering hives
from which sail bees, their resolute flight
into July, into my garden.
Majid Naficy: In Spite of Your Aching Body
In spite of your aching body
Get up from your bed
And come to watch the river
Eva-Maria Simms: Letter from my 60th Birthday
I broke into tears before the great abbey door because the lament of the elements had overwhelmed my heart.
Virginia Woolf: Becoming an Artist
Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.
Naomi Shihab Nye: To Netanyahu
My Palestinian father named his donkey after you…
Now I think he insulted the donkey.
Jose Padua: Around the Corner from the Neighborhood Convenience Store and Four Thousand Miles from the Streets of Barcelona
the good ole boy,
sitting up high in
his pickup truck
and smiling smugly
Joan E. Bauer: For Auden — Circling Toward Home
Art, you claimed: born of humiliation.
You knew that early & you had the gift
of double focus, of seeing the world
with more than one lens.
Sydney Lea: I Was Thinking Of Beauty
I was thinking of beauty
as something that will return–here’s Curtis Porter’s sweet horn–
outlasting our disputations.
Molly Fisk: That Kind of Woman
We try them on as subjects, our mythical forebears,
wondering who we are: Penelope. Persephone. Eve.
Eurydice. Sleeping Beauty, Cassandra, Ophelia, Cinderella.
Barbie.
Danusha Laméris: Small Kindnesses
For the waitress
to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder,
and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass.
We have so little of each other, now.
Doug Anderson: Orchid
Finally, a small wind to move the curtains.
Hot in this upstairs room. Outside,
the dogs sleep on the cool concrete floor
of the garage.
Anna Akhmatova: Lot’s Wife
“It’s not too late, you can still look back
at the red towers of your native Sodom,
the square where once you sang, the spinning-shed,
at the empty windows set in the tall house
where sons and daughters blessed your marriage-bed.”
