Mary Jane White: Lindeman
you led me alone
into the sandhills, told me how you were named
for the lindens that grow like smaller oaks
or elms in Europe’s parks
Jose Padua: North Richmond Street, Being Blind
This place used to be
called Helltown and some people still call it
that, except at that precise hour when the sky
over the mountains is a perfect flinty lapis lazuli
blue, and the river is a woman named Edna with
the most joyous laugh
Lisa Fay Coutley: Duplex
your son is a homeless drug addict your son is
your son is a homeless drug addict your son
until it becomes real
Video: Jane Hirshfield reads “For What Binds Us” (with text included)
And when two people have loved each other
see how it is like a
scar between their bodies,
stronger, darker, and proud
Emily Dickinson: I am afraid to own a Body
Double Estate—entailed at pleasure
Upon an unsuspecting Heir—
Abayomi Animashaun: Collateral Damage
In the orchards, the old revolutionaries
Have gathered again for tea
Deborah Bogen: Two Poems
I think of the ways we got it wrong. All the things we didn’t know. Who did it — and why — where it was done and how we can think about the Lord’s Prayer as thirteen ways of looking at a tragedy.
Bill Knott: A Sudden Departure
A sudden raisinstorm broke
Raisins falling everywhere pellmell.
The occasion uniqued my head, I thought
If this can happen raisins raining
Upon persons paining why I can leave anytime
Without feeling shame
Pablo Neruda: Ode to Summer | translated by Wally Swist
Summer, red violin,
clear cloud,
a buzz
saw
or cicada
John Clare: The Instinct of Hope
Is there another world for this frail dust
To warm with life and be itself again?
George Witte: After the Recent Unpleasantness
it wouldn’t kill you to consider
dancing, just this once, alone
in backyard secrecy while dawn
arrays dishevelled underclothes
Laure-Anne Bosselaar: Dusk
Yet, while time takes its time to steal the light,
another music stirs, as if memory’s notes
had escaped their staff, & the past came to sing
beside me of its ordinary moments
Doug Anderson: What if I wrote a poem
About being seventy-seven
and trying not
to speculate how long I’ve got left
Video: state of America (a visual expression)
This visceral piece dedicated to John Singleton unfolds the journey of a black youth moving through the chaotic American landscape into his manhood.
