Susan Kelly-DeWitt: Frangible Operas
Tonight the bells of the flowers ring out
Nidia Hernández: Únicamente mar | Only Sea
For days now
something like nothingness is growing
Michael Simms: Imperfect
My native tongue doesn’t allow
the imperfect tense, so it’s difficult
to say how something might used
to happen but no more.
Lynne Thompson: Sleep, Country Of
it’s almost time for today’s circadian alarm which is the same in Gaza as in Glendale, California. But not yet, Grasshopper, not yet.
Fred Johnston: The Art of War
I can tell by the weight of your voice
How long this room-to-room guerrilla war will to last
Barbara Crooker: Queens
Wielding her cane
like a weapon, she pushed pedestrians out of the way,
held it up like a banner as we crossed against the light.
Naomi Shihab Nye: Different Ways to Pray
There were the men who had been shepherds so long
they walked like sheep.
Under the olive trees, they raised their arms—
Hear us! We have pain on earth!
David Kirby: Ode to Asparagus
O wonder! O brave new world, that has such vegetables in it.
Larry Levis: Make a Law So That the Spine Remembers Wings
So that the truant boy may go steady with the State,
So that in his spine a memory of wings
Will make his shoulders tense & bend
Like a thing already flown
Sean Sexton: Worth
I’ve wasted these days in the darkening hurry of the hours,
let myself—dryhanded, and ignorant—determine one aim in
deference to another.
Lisa Suhair Majaj: For the Dead Among Us
We will keep you alive
in our longing, in our breath.
Terry Murcko: A Truckload of Imaginary Dynamite
For protesting the conditions on the shop floor,
Jumped by company goons and beaten half to death,
He recovered and returned to give those goons more
Than they gave, picked up his pay, and calmly left.
Barbara Hamby: Ode to Knots, Noise, Waking Up at Three, and Falling Asleep Reading to My Id
Why does everything seems so impossible
in the middle of the night? I wake up at three
with my mind in a knot
Phillip Terman: My Blossoming Everything
It is red raspberries in a circular thicket of thorns.
Who are you, my beloved? My sweetness,
My swallowtail, my infinite youth?
