Jason Irwin: We Watched the Lights
You hardly touched your food.
Down to fifty-eight pounds
at your last check-up.
Yet, your hair was still beautiful…
Sandy Solomon: Foundling
You stood, small and mute,
on the stoop where she’d left you
with a tiny, plastic suitcase,
like a bad joke, beside you.
Nick Graham: Legends
Game trails, foot paths, roads—ever less narrow,
history’s cool path of annotation.
Maps fold flat and unfold worlds we might know,
showing how to get where we long to go
Liz Moran: Telling the Bees (for JoAnn)
Your emptiness
depends upon the bees.
Loretta Graceffo: Music is a living thing
We are all your children
If you hear us, join us now
We’re gonna strike because the waters are rising
We’re gonna strike because our people are dying
We’re gonna strike for life and everything we love
Michael Simms: Variations on Vallejo
They killed you in Memphis on a Thursday.
On a balcony with your friends
You held your hands on the railing
And looked over the long field
Into the next life.
Charles Bukowski: Odes to Los Angeles
man mowing the lawn across the way from me
don’t you see the young girls walking down the sidewalks now
with knives in their purses?
David Huddle: Villanelle for Lady Day
Billie said, “If I’m going to sing like someone
else, then I don’t need to sing at all.” Let’s
just say I was white and knew how to conform.
Molly Fisk: God Speaks to the Rope Swings of Summer
in his gentlest voice, reminding them
about change, about fallow fields and the quiet
everything needs to grow stronger
Peter Schireson: Last Night in the Freshness that Followed a Summer Rain
How we looked into each other, how we danced through vampire nightclubs,
our intentions green and full of desire…
Elizabeth Kirschner: Because the Sky is a Thousand Soft Hurts
Never forget how easily we love what survives to be loved.
M.A. Sinnhuber: In this Time
propel yourself forward—
as in airplane force
or Air Force or forceps
forcing a baby to be born
Video: “Black Boy” by Richard Wright
The American Place Theatre – Literature to Life Stage Presentation of Black Boy by Richard Wright.
Jose Padua: Reflections on a Lesson that Would Soon Be Made More Clear to Me by Gil Scott-Heron
In 1971 I’m
thirteen years old
watching a big
Vietnam war protest
on television
