Majid Naficy: The Persian New Year
When the Thirteenth Day comes
You’ll go with the flowing water
And speak to the sky and the earth
Of the beautiful moments of love.
Elise Kazanjian: Reading at Bird & Beckett book store in San Francisco
We pick our fights. We
march for rights. We
thousands strong. We
replace wrong.
David Kirby: Penelope’s Suitors
Honestly. Not the brightest guys in the world, are they?
Her husband sails off to Troy, and beautiful Penelope’s there
just ripe for the picking, only she keeps putting them off
Pascale Petit: Black Jaguar with Quai Saint-Bernard
If I hold my breath, half-close my eyes
and listen hard — there at the tongue’s root,
in the voicebox of night, I might hear
the almost-vanished. He’s summoning his prey…
Ellen McGrath Smith: Plea to the Plutocrats During Holy Week
We will all be together, you will never avoid it,
in the air, the earth, and the ash.
Philip Terman: Tell Them Everything
Lucky she was, not to spend time in an Iranian
Jail, fortunate to emigrate and meet my brother
And fall in love, a Jew and an Iranian
Philip Levine: Blue
the men wakening one
at a time and reaching for
both the sky and the earth
James Crews: The Pond at Sunset
I forget I’ve already arrived
in the life I want, and that I am
still arriving at the same time.
Alison Hurwitz: Submerged
the story run across his skin, his mind a moving wheel
that cannot stop its circling, bearing down the road
with grackle wings, a story leafing past each turning
Ma Yongbo: Frost on the Window
It is spring now and the frost on the window is gradually thinning.
Dorianne Laux: The Optimism of French Toast
I think of my Acadian ancestors
landing on the shores of Nova Scotia, divining
logs from the deep woods, fashioning windows,
hanging laundry from two oars dug into sand—
the flags of domesticity flayed by the wind.
Al Ortolani: Prayer Boat
Each night I say a prayer of thanks
to some higher power, a thanks for
the chance to be alive as a thinking
being, for the family and friends
that surround me
H.C. Palmer: An Old Kansas Farm Boy’s Take on Gary Snyder’s “Hay for the Horses” or Why I Became a Poet
In the early 1950s I worked summers as a part of a team of 4 high school football players bucking bales of alfalfa hay for a local rancher in Southeast Kansas. We moved over 1,000 bales from his hay meadow to the loft in his barn each cutting.
Lisel Mueller: Monet Refuses the Operation
I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don’t see
