Wally Swist: The Caregiver
the depth of bad
feeling is in proportion
to how good we are
Richard Michelson: Angels with Guns Guarding the Gates of Heaven
My grandmother didn’t
live to see her youngest son, my father, murdered in a Brooklyn
gutter by a fifth generation, drug-addicted, unemployed house-
painter whose ancestors were dragged here like devils in chains.
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer: When She Was Afraid She Wasn’t Good Enough
When fear scuttled through her thoughts
with its eight slender legs; when she recognized
the shiny black body, the bulbous abdomen
Video: “All the World’s a Stage” by William Shakespeare
Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honor, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon’s mouth.
Michael Simms: Hatred
I scythed, mowed, axed
hoed, trimmed, yanked
and eyed with vicious intent
this intruder eating my garden.
But the satanic bramble would not die.
Video: Suheir Hammad | Poems of war, peace, women, power
Poet Suheir Hammad performs two spine-tingling spoken-word pieces: Wait for the astonishing line: “Do not fear what has blown up. If you must, fear the unexploded.”
James Crews: I Keep the Window Open
Life’s too fragile
to waste on money or importance,
handing over the hours that will never
be returned to us.
Kurt Brown: Fisherman
He’s only felt the shadow
of something enormous darken his life. Or has he?
Laure-Anne Bosselaar: Tonight’s Dinner Companions
you, old poet, gone, whose lines I often
say aloud against the ocean’s constant shush
David Kirby: More Than This
you three must be thirsty,
come in and get a drink, and the cowboy says okay,
but what is this place, and the guy says it’s heaven
Carol Moldaw: Game Face
To see the ravages of aging on one’s face used to be inevitable.
Now it means one’s taken a stance.
Gail Langstroth: Easter Sunday
then The Sun This Morning : one round, middle C
Alice Dunbar-Nelson: Sonnet
I had no thought of violets of late,
The wild, shy kind that spring beneath your feet
In wistful April days, when lovers mate
And wander through the fields in raptures sweet.
