Claudia Lefko: Dear Refaat Alareer | A Letter of Gratitude
As per your wishes we’re striving to live—hopefully a deeper and more reflective life, including a life of action against the genocide in Palestine.
Byron Hoot: Two poems about beginning and ending
The death of my father is nearly a month
away – 31 years. The haunting of longing
has begun.
Alexis Rhone Fancher: Hermanas
You’re the same, you two, J, my lover, said. Of course you feel an affinity. I stared at the Frida Kahlo self-portrait in his hands. Frida’s soulful sweetness stared back. You … Continue reading
Arlene Weiner: For My Husband Who is Depressed at the State of the World
Lilacs perfume the city air. Smoke from wildfires
turns sunsets glorious. Talons tear the breast of the dove.
The world changes. The world doesn’t change.
Michael T. Young: What the World Waits for
Like that day I sat in the yard
under the braids of summer light,
reading, weighing thought
against thought for what was right
or what was wrong
Michele Battiste: 101st Note on Violence
Cast iron: iconic. Romantic
even. Well oiled. Seasoned. But far
too heavy. Fatal. Certainly. If wielded.
Determination or luck.
Alison Luterman: What I Learned
singing’s made of sweat and spittle,
tears and snot, hot breath,
and the soggy crumb of a potato chip left
in a back corner of your unflossed tooth
Baron Wormser: Dark Time
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall.
That place among the rocks—is it a cave,
Or winding path? The edge is what I have.
Michael Simms: The Skateboarder
Not sport but defiance
Not lifestyle but thrust and risk
A kick, an aversion to common sense
Laure-Anne Bosselaar and Kurt Brown: “Yonder” by Herman de Coninck
I seek a village.
And in it a house. And in it a
room, in which a bed, in which a woman.
And in that woman a lap.
Sean Sexton: Planting Aeschynomene Seed
It pours from a muslin sack like sunlight
through a cracked window shade, fifty pounds
to a metal washtub, old as your footsteps.
Mary B. Moore: Amanda and the News, c. 2016
I’m old as stones and not as solid.
Gloria fritters a while
and fiddles my left eardrum,
a tickle not a hum.
Thomas McGuire: Garden Plots
I’ve come to half believe what Ho Chi Minh
said about his need for more poets
who could lead a charge, sharpen bayonets.
Meg Kearney: Two Sonnets
And what emotional impulse leads you
to speak of the heart, that cliché, its chambers
for sleeping, for weeping, and remember
the chamber for repair—of course you do
