Alexis Rhone Fancher: Kate’s Pantoum
My best friend shows up two days post mortem.
Her soul not yet departed, she sits on my bed.
The mattress gives with her weight; I feel her shadow.
When I reach for her, she’s gone.
José A. Alcántara: To a Friend Who Does Not Believe in God
from the first chord
on the guitar, her body stilled, her face went slack.
For two minutes, she went somewhere else,
somewhere quiet, beautiful, free of pain.
Miriam Levine: They Call It Menopause
my brain
lit up with fantasies in
which I was dominant, a top,
not on men but women.
My thrusts were cruel.
Edna St. Vincent Millay: Song of a Second April
Hepaticas that pleased you so
Are here again, and butterflies.
Naomi Shihab Nye: Trying to Name What Doesn’t Change
Every Tuesday on Morales Street
butchers crack the necks of a hundred hens.
The widow in the tilted house
spices her soup with cinnamon.
Ask her what doesn’t change.
Byron Hoot: To Life
The restlessness
of age has entered me. That longing for more
knowing there’s only less to take in.
Barbara Crooker: Stillbirth
Dear Supreme Court Injustices,
you who are so proud of overturning
Roe vs. Wade. Do you have any idea
what it’s like to lose a child, a wanted child,
one who never got to use her pink lungs,
take in this sweet air?
Sean Sexton: Fool’s Day
Was it they’d mostly finished their work,
how the bulls came along this morning, let
themselves be driven back to their pasture
still in ruin with holes dug from last year’s
nine-month layoff?
Sandy Solomon: Hunger
His parents were doctors, Jewish refugees,
with a German-sounding name. In Des Moines,
in a time of war, he’d leave for school each day
carrying his painted metal lunchbox.
Rachel Hadas: Three Poems
Wait. Something I had never thought to see
again clanks forward from obscurity-
that creaky train I’d once been riding on,
a journey slow and grim.
Louise Bogan: The Changed Woman
The cracked glass fuses at a touch,
The wound heals over, and is set
In the whole flesh, and is not much
Quite to remember or forget.
James Crews: Beech Trees in Spring
Perhaps they need the reassurance,
or maybe they’re here to lend music
to the silence of winter
Nidia Hernández: Miami Book Fair 2016 (Spanish and English versions)
a poet and a tree
are always interchangeable
Ma Yongbo: Father’s Little Boat (English and Chinese)
She sits beside him all night,
watching the Father’s darkness,
listening to the careful breath of the dark,
listening to the broken winds of another world.
