James Crews: New Year
It’s so cold on this January morning
the condensation in the corner of each window
has frozen to the glass, cannot be wiped away.
Dawn Potter: Sleeping with the Cat
the bossiest boyfriend I have ever entertained,
crammed between my knees, purring himself into glory
Jose Padua: Feasts, Reincarnations, and Other Elegies for Days Gone By
Now we live in the age of vapors, gasping
for breath, running for the exits. In the middle of
dim rough days and cruel centuries, let our love
be electric, and our home a movable foundation.
Video: Wooden Wheel | A Filmmaker’s Tender Tribute to Her Seafaring Father
Grounded by a sailing injury, Arthur still finds solace in the Irish Sea.
Lisa Zimmerman: Missing Billy
You wore sobriety like a t-shirt
with the sleeves hacked off.
Chard deNiord: See How Brightly The Leaves Fall With Grief
How long then short the days grow across the Earth.
Michael Simms: Sacred Sleep
My sleep is punctuated with terror
and excursions into weirdness,
and I usually wake in the dark hours
Bhikshuni Vasetthi: Oh, My Heart
I called out to my grief and drew it toward me.
I held my grief and gently rocked it.
Shh, I said. There, there. There, there.
Doug Anderson: Ghost
The old man finally just went away
to live in the mountains. Two goats,
a dog for company. The wind
made a harp of the pines.
Charlie Amáyá Scott: Beyond the Binary | Retelling the Diné Creation Story
I have spent years learning and unlearning what it means to be Diné and to be Queer and to be Trans in this world—this world that denied me First Woman’s gift. Now I am reclaiming this gift.
Baron Wormser: Remembering the Alchemists & Other Essays
One sentence speaks for all his direct, well-wrought sentences: “We are inside the largest militarist society the world has ever known, and we are at war always.”
Cynthia Atkins: Apocalypse in Twitter-Verse
Is that, finally,
the ache we shed with the last breath. —
Fogged faces passing on a train, trees
and smoke and hills.
Peter Makuck: Winter Morning
At the window,
coffee in hand,
I’m just in time to see
a painted bunting
settle on the porch feeder.
Patricia Jabbeh Wesley: When Monrovia Rises
All day, boys younger
than history can remember, shout at one another
on a street corner near me about a country they
have never seen.
