Yana Djin: Church Bell
A mere splinter I am,
a mere speck
without you
and your light.
Jason Baldinger: Résumé
apparently just to live
just to experience life
is not an acceptable trade
Tiffany Muller: The Court Ruling That Sold Our Democracy
Ten years after Citizens United, the damage is broad and deep — but we can still fix it.
Danusha Laméris: Omens
I wish I could make sense
of the child’s empty bed,
the bullet hole though my brother’s heart.
Olga Tokarczuk: The Tender Narrator (Nobel Lecture)
I believe I must tell stories as if the world were a living, single entity, constantly forming before our eyes, and as if we were a small and at the same time powerful part of it.
Riad Saleh Hussein: from Destruction of Blood Circulation
But love letters become time bombs…
Where should I begin?
You said: start from the alphabet’s massacre!
Doug Anderson: One More Morning
Let me say that love will not
let me alone. If it has let you alone, go back
and find it where you hid it under a scrim
of scar-tissue.
Charlotte Turner Smith: Sonnet Written in the Churchyard at Middleton in Sussex
She saw herself as a poet first and foremost, poetry at that period being considered the most exalted form of literature. Scholars now credit her with transforming the sonnet into an expression of woeful sentiment. Although an important writer and poet, Smith had a difficult family life and died in poverty, largely forgotten.
Michael Simms: Re-reading Christina Rossetti’s ‘In an Artist’s Studio’
The value of Rossetti’s poem lies in both the expert use of the Petrarchan sonnet, a particularly challenging form to master in English, and in the poet’s complex stance on the role of art in creating and re-enforcing images of women.
Jose Padua: Prelude to a Highly Personal Confabulation of Zen and the Art of War
how I could one day live in New York City
with half my mind in a flame-like state
of absolute intensity
S. B. Merrow: A Becoming Place
A pop-up wilderness west of the Piedmont,
folded land of sudden impediments
scored by creeks and runs
Baruch November: Dream 12
They tell me it is okay to dance
to this music as we all should
be very modern religious Jews
who need to bust the most modern moves.
Marco North: After the Circus Left Town
There is nothing like the righteous anger of a true New Yorker.
Sandra McPherson: Richard Milhous
He was ill-favored and uncraved and yet had we known
his secret life we would have perceived his lyingas a form of gentleness…
