Rachel Hadas: February 29, 2020
That extra day, that ordinary day,
I got where I was going on the train
and taught the lyric leap, as per the plan;
then, tired, happy, bathed in poetry,
caught a train and travelled back again
Rebecca Weiner Tompkins: Adultery
Dark pines and thin silvery trees
throw shadows on your face lowering to meet mine;
we make love, wrapped in heavy coats,
knees bumping glove box and seatback.
Mary Jane White: “A Late Reply” by Anna Akhmatova
Distract me, my native fields,
From all that has happened to me,
The abyss that swallowed my loved ones
Matt Hohner: Remembering “The Jar” On the Eve of Another War 
we decided
at 2:30 a.m. to flick the cockroaches scuttling
along the low wall on the front edge of the roof
onto traffic on Charles Street below
Lynn Levin: ‘Masquerade’ by Carolyne Wright
In her new poetry collection, Carolyne Wright recounts a love affair between two poets—he African-American, she white—from its rapturous beginning to its shattering end. Wright gifts us with that rarity in verse: a page turner.
Carolyne Wright: Two Poems from ‘Masquerade’
These coastal nights in candle-flickering dark
I ride you easy, bare-backed and bare-breasted,
your sex straight up inside me like a second
spine.
Michael T. Young: To Fly
Maybe it’s a vision so clear the dark can’t darken it,
and the mountainous range of roadblocks
and barricades can’t dim the image of it. It’s fixed
and steady. An unchanging map in our blood
Sharon Fagan McDermott: War
This intensity, this buildup
of noise—Help us! —an echo of an old human
refrain through the mad and fucked up timbres
of our human history.
Kim Stafford: Four poems about the current war
How much rain to fill the Volga?
Not soon, the end of weeping.
Cynthia Atkins: The Last Cricket Standing
The women are lighting Shabbos candles
with Molotov Cocktails — A baby is passed to arms
on a train.
Charlie Brice: Out of the Closet
Clothed in my cheap JC Penny’s suit, holding a bible, sitting on a container of disinfectant that smells like murder, like what they’d use to clean the war machine of … Continue reading
Edwin Muir: The Horses
Barely a twelvemonth after
The seven days war that put the world to sleep,
Late in the evening the strange horses came.
By then we had made our covenant with silence
Carolyn Holmes Gregory: The Body
You know you are not in charge
of your body any more
despite its joyous odes
and incantations.
Chard deNiord: What Can Anyone Say
In memory of the Ukrainian children, parents, and civilians who have been murdered by Russian troops and Prime Minister Putin during Russia’s recent invasion of Ukraine
