David Fenza: For Liam was Many
For he was so curious about the shapes & pressures
of our American lives, he made each friend
feel like the genius-author of a great story.
Rachel Hadas: Poets and novelists have been writing about life under COVID-19 for more than a century
Good artists seem, in our alarming and prolonged time […] to be leaping over months, decades and centuries, to speak directly to us now.
S.B. Merrow: Craving
I’m talking about a night we spend
in the same body on the same smooth stones
on the bottom of the dry river
when a storm comes.
Ira Sadoff: Emendation
I don’t have to go back
To my childhood, there’s nothing there
I still want…
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper: Bury Me in a Free Land
All that my yearning spirit craves,
Is bury me not in a land of slaves.
Jose Padua: On Driving up Stonewall Jackson Highway with the Intention of Declaring Sovereignty Over the Surrounding Territories
I drive with the windows
rolled down
and the stereo
turned up loud
to Ella Fitzgerald
singing “Blue Skies”
as I look up
Juniper White: The Distance Between Rings
let us sit under our words, a many-
ringed tree, bodies drunk on lost
time, listening to delicate leaves
Ira Sadoff: Old Selves (read by James Anderson)
Ok, I no longer want them,
the many selves I had to manage
that exhausted everyone.
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…
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.
