Delmore Schwartz: O Love, Sweet Animal
O Love, dark animal,
With your strangeness go
Like any freak or clown:
Appease the child in her
Because she is alone
Tony Gloeggler: Bridges (1994)
…he stops in front of you,
extends his hand and says,
“Satch Paige is my name.”
Catherine Gonick: Gazing at a Model of Australopithecus
She might have clung to her freedom
to live among leaves a while longer,
in paradise not quite lost.
Ma Yongbo: Three poems for Helen Pletts in English & Chinese
No one can walk here,
save shy deer, save wind and rain,
save those invisible wings
that can gently lift the whole garden
up to the constellations.
Laure-Anne Bosselaar: Lassitude
the stars barely visible above the oil rigs off the coast,
aglow like phantom ships
Audio: W.S. Merwin reads “In Time”
and started to dance without music
slowly we danced around and around
in circles and after a while we hummed
when the world was about to end
Jordan Smith: Tattoo
The tattoo place was in the strip mall
Between the pizza shop and the liquor store,
Where all during Covid he bought
His tequila because the owner played
Old blues on the stereo and kept his distance
Robinson Jeffers: Night
Over the dark mountain, over the dark pinewood,
Down the long dark valley along the shrunken river,
Returns the splendor without rays, the shining of shadow
Wilson R. M. Taylor: Two Poems
Today I said goodbye to my mother
for a few weeks. Five months ago,
the doctor estimated she had six to twelve
to live. I fly back and forth to replace futures
we’ve lost; I leave long scars in the atmosphere.
Jianqing Zheng: Dreaminations
[…] young woman with a basket in her hand walking down the road, her long skirt swaying like sunlight rustling with shriveled leaves. Is she taking lunch to her husband harvesting cotton or going berry picking in the woods?
Jerome Bergland: The Dreaminations of Jianqing Zheng
Jianqing Zheng long ago established himself as one of the most thrilling and gifted writers of haibun and tanka prose.
Cynthia Atkins: When Harry Met Sally
A light quaked on earth, because when the waitress
gasped and blushed, we gasped and blushed,
sitting in the plush dark aisles to our interiors.
Robert Hayden: Those Winter Sundays
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?
James Crews: The Slightest Kindness
We were walking the icy streets,
talking about the ways our country
has betrayed us again—promises
unkept, laws broken beyond repair.
