Rachel Hadas: 460 Riverside Drive
What ghostly messenger
was rattling away unseen
on the other side of the door?
Jason Baldinger: a howard johnson’s prayer
I float on dreams that stretch
middle mississippi to machu picchu
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer: Tonight, When I Turn Right on Ogden
By the time I turn onto the highway toward home
it is fifteen years ago
and my father is sitting in his favorite chair
James Crews: The Trouble with Beauty
The trouble with beauty
is the clinging to it,
wanting things to stay
the way they first appeared
Francis Thompson: The Hound of Heaven
I fled Him down the nights and down the days
I fled Him down the arches of the years
I fled Him down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind…
Zeina Azzam, Andy Young, David Adès: Three poems about Gaza
Only the children, terrified, wide-eyed,
have no complicity as we lead them, again,
sacrificial lambs to the slaughter.
Tayve Neese: Only Her Buried Hand Rises
From soil, the wrist and fingers are not bloom and stamen,
although the child that first found the rising tarsals
thought them something for picking.
Majid Naficy: Every Night in this City
Every night in this city
Thousands of people sleep on the street
Gary Fincke: Naming the Sky
…because my mother
Has died, wonder if he means to show me
Where she is, how one cluster has reformed
To suggest a melodrama of hope.
Naomi Shihab Nye, Debra Winger: Zero
I can’t stop thinking about classrooms
bedrooms pets toys strawberry patches
altars bent skillets spatulas. The skirts
of little girls. The pink. I can’t stop thinking.
Lisa Suhair Majaj: Two Poems
This is a body enfleshed,
like yours. This is a body
broken, like mine.
Richard Hoffman: Autumn Leaves | An Improvisation after Ahmad Jamal
I know you know
as you have always known
Kathy Engel: What’s Another Word for Genocide
in April you told my students
a poem starts anywhere one
small drop of water traveling
Edna St. Vincent Millay: Ashes of Life
Love has gone and left me and the days are all alike;
Eat I must, and sleep I will, — and would that night were here!
But ah! — to lie awake and hear the slow hours strike!
