Louie Skipper: Every Guide
Even in death a man who sets out to find himself
has already lost his way.
Alison Luterman: She for whom I am named
left Russia at fifteen to follow her betrothed.
Good-bye, skinny chickens and fly-bitten cows,
synagogue leaning on one side, as if to dodge blows
from a Cossack’s boot
Norman Solomon: Bob Dylan and the Ukraine Crisis
I’ve learned to hate the Russians
All through my whole life
If another war comes
It’s them we must fight
T. R. Hummer: My Wife in Chemo
The house of healing is crystalline, clean
as the diagram of a carbon molecule drawn
With a laser beam on one facet of a diamond.
Terry Blackhawk: My Father Goes to Sunday School
What are you doing here?
an elder asked, a deacon perhaps, or prayer leader.
Mary Jane White: “For You” by Marina Tsvetaeva
For you, I dissolve a handful of
Burnt hair in the glass.
So you will not eat, not sing,
Not drink, not sleep.
Richard Hoffman: Summer Job
“The trouble with intellectuals,” Manny, my boss,
once told me, “is that they don’t know nothing
till they can explain it to themselves.
Jose Padua: Those Years That Went Down
daytime drunks
still gather,
no longer hidden by
the ornament
of night
Danielle DeTiberus: In the Middle of Fucking You, I Pause
Twenty years together and yet
You were new to me again.
Baron Wormser: “Sweet, ironic” America and Cesare Pavese 
Among the many heartbreaking sentences in the diaries of the great Italian poet and writer Cesare Pavese, these few, at the very end when he was grappling with his love … Continue reading
Meleager: A Garland of Love Poems
Ah, little archer, so you thought
to hide from me there
in Zenophila’s eyes!
Edna St. Vincent Millay: When you, that at this moment are to me
When you, that at this moment are to me
Dearer than words on paper, shall depart,
And be no more the warder of my heart…
Sean Sexton: Poem Letter to Rick Campbell
A soft-spoken vision runs their gamut
to the end of your pages, a universe far away from mine, yet, by your
gifts, remains within reach as the ruckus of the interstate in the distance
when the wind is out of the West on such a morning as this.
Stephanie L. Harper: A Crown Most Unroyal
Some humans really don’t object to dying
as much as they hold dear an asshat’s right
to choose to spread disease over complying
