Eleanor Lerman: Fiddlestick
Admit nothing tonight: break everything
that can be broken and banished and
let it be known that the heart
is nothing but an old fiddlestick
lying forgotten in the grass
Jordan Smith: Parts of the Same Project,
Awake to a language he didn’t know,
A woman by a window, her silhouette
Between light crossing a meadow
Barbara Crooker: Patty’s Charcoal Drive-In
First job. In tight black shorts
and a white bowling shirt, red lipstick
and bouncing ponytail, I present
each overflowing tray as if it were a banquet.
Jane Mead: Passing a Truck Full of Chickens/at Night on Highway Eighty
I saw the one that made me slow some—
I lingered there beside her for five miles.
Jose Padua: Driving Out of Town on the Day Before What Would Have Been My Mother’s 93rd Birthday
she would have loved the blue and yellow tones of this early evening
Pennsylvania sky as busy as a symphony over the landscape of this small town
so far from Asia
John Ashbery: A Worldly Country
For night, as usual, knew what it was doing,
providing sleep to offset the great ungluing
that tomorrow again would surely bring.
Ted Kooser: Abandoned Farmhouse
Something went wrong, says the empty house
in the weed-choked yard. Stones in the fields
say he was not a farmer; the still-sealed jars
in the cellar say she left in a nervous haste.
Barbara Hamby: Ode to Hardware Stores
Where have all the hardware stores gone—dusty, sixty-watt
warrens with wood floors, cracked linoleum,
poured concrete painted blood red?
Baruch November: Victor “Young” Perez
The Jewish flyweight from Tunisia—
who modeled himself after the Battling Siki,
a boxer from Senegal—
should have died early in the ring,
Lisa M. Hase-Jackson: Post Solstice Academics
my ancestors are
druid tree-dwellers, forest dancers
intimate with boreal communities
and life’s brief promise—
Michael Simms: Two Poems Inspired by Sean Sexton
Some people should be allowed to live forever
on the basis of our world’s great need. — Sean Sexton
Edna St. Vincent Millay: What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why
What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning; but the rain
Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply
Tony Hoagland: Sweet Ruin
Maybe that is what he was after,
my father, when he arranged, ten years ago,
to be discovered in a mobile home
with a woman named Roxanne, an attractive,
recently divorced masseuse.
Sally Bliumis-Dunn: That Night
like a cage lit by moon in a darkness held at bay
beyond this room where the loud chandelier
lit us as though on a stage where we act our rawest selves
