Claudia Lefko: Dear Refaat Alareer | A Letter of Gratitude
As per your wishes we’re striving to live—hopefully a deeper and more reflective life, including a life of action against the genocide in Palestine.
Alexis Rhone Fancher: Hermanas
You’re the same, you two, J, my lover, said. Of course you feel an affinity. I stared at the Frida Kahlo self-portrait in his hands. Frida’s soulful sweetness stared back. You … Continue reading
Byron Hoot: Two poems about beginning and ending
The death of my father is nearly a month
away – 31 years. The haunting of longing
has begun.
Arlene Weiner: For My Husband Who is Depressed at the State of the World
Lilacs perfume the city air. Smoke from wildfires
turns sunsets glorious. Talons tear the breast of the dove.
The world changes. The world doesn’t change.
Michael T. Young: What the World Waits for
Like that day I sat in the yard
under the braids of summer light,
reading, weighing thought
against thought for what was right
or what was wrong
Baron Wormser: Dark Time
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall.
That place among the rocks—is it a cave,
Or winding path? The edge is what I have.
Alison Luterman: What I Learned
singing’s made of sweat and spittle,
tears and snot, hot breath,
and the soggy crumb of a potato chip left
in a back corner of your unflossed tooth
Sean Sexton: Planting Aeschynomene Seed
It pours from a muslin sack like sunlight
through a cracked window shade, fifty pounds
to a metal washtub, old as your footsteps.
Abby Zimet: We Shall Not Be Moved Chap. 784
50 faith leaders gathered at the ICE facility to link their arms, block the entrance, demand information on conditions inside and declare, “This is not acceptable” – after which they were set upon by goons.
Mary B. Moore: Amanda and the News, c. 2016
I’m old as stones and not as solid.
Gloria fritters a while
and fiddles my left eardrum,
a tickle not a hum.
Thomas McGuire: Garden Plots
I’ve come to half believe what Ho Chi Minh
said about his need for more poets
who could lead a charge, sharpen bayonets.
Sandy Solomon: Reading
The pasts, the past perfects: each sentence
a forest pool shining with borrowed,
broken light
James Crews: Meditation Class
I wiped the fog from the glass and saw
a statue of the Buddha on a shelf, laughing
at himself, laughing at me standing there
in a puddle, under a pine tree that kept
dripping on my head
Laurence Musgrove: America Windows
A dreamer awakens, holds up
her pen like Liberty, writes
in moonlight page after page,
sails on a ship, bird in a tree,
songs to a yellow sun shining.
