Tony Gloeggler: Down by an Old Mill Where a Big Part of Your Heart Lives
…you and Jesse
have a gift. You can both stop time.
He’s autistic and you love the kid,
who’s now a man.
Barbara Crooker: Car Hop
I made seventy-five cents an hour, plus tips. All those shiny quarters. Some went down the throat of the jukebox—96 Tears, What Becomes of the Brokenhearted, Reach Out / I’ll Be There.
Margo Berdeshevsky: God Bless the Child That’s Got His Own
He says — you will let go he will let go the branch when he is
Ready I nod, yes, he says, climbing the hill from the sea
Where he has gone to wash distance and salt before it comes
Dane Cervine: Holography
this is what Jeannie’s lover felt—the empty year
reeling out of orbit, no gravity, lost
in a centerless universe blown wide
Allen Ginsberg: A Supermarket in California
What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking at the full moon.
Lex Runciman: Two Poems for Two Poets
Madeline, mother of poems, bright flowers
This day wild on your desk, bless you your sky
That does not let go. Your St. Ursula of bilocation
And irony, bless us here and bless us again there.
Naomi Shihab Nye: Before I Was A Gazan
I was a boy
and my homework was missing,
paper with numbers on it,
stacked and lined
Matthew Carey Salyer: Carrier
Catholicschoolboys
fret as I once did like dappled stones
in their own fists. Scuffed wingtips. My ilk.
Laure-Anne Bosselaar: Widow’s Bedroom
Light puddles over the old floor planks, then climbs
the wall behind his place in our bed, & glows there.
Past noon, slow shadows douse that light & push it
out of the room. As if they knew he won’t come back.
Barbara Hamby: How to Pray
Falling down on your knees is the easy part, like drinking
a glass of cold water on a hot day, the parched straw
of your throat flooded, your knees hitting the ground,
a prizefighter in the final rounds.
David Kirby: That Happened Sometimes
Frank’s grandmother
and great-grandmother would cook pounds
and pounds of pasta al pomodoro every week
and bring it to the Italian prisoners of war
at Camp Belle Mead, New Jersey.
Toi Derricotte: My dad & sardines
i’ve made an altar called
The Altar for Healing the Father & Child
Daniel Lawless: From the Afterlife
My last days were not so bad, my ex-wife says from the afterlife,
Not so bad as you think. So relax.
Dawn Potter: The Way We Live Now
a man solitary as a grieving
arrow types
a text to his daughter and
the text feathers into the ether
