Mark Danowsky: The Rocky Mountain Locust Surge
One story is about the farmer
who just started running
right into the black mass
David Lauterstein: Lulav
I am a Jew. I am ashamed of those wanting to kill.
The people of Gaza shake their own bodies
in six directions, with nowhere to go,
their only harvest, soil.
Chard deNiord: Patience Is The Tinder
a silence in which you hear
in the midst of the noise all around you
a voice that speaks inside the ear
inside your ear that depends
on silence for writing it down
Michael Simms: Serene Gorilla in a Cloud of Butterflies
Her name is Malui and she is walking through a cloud of butterflies she’s disturbed.
Stephen Dobyns: Prague
The day I learned my wife was dying
I told myself if anyone said, Well, she had
a good life, I’d punch him in the nose.
How much life represents a good life?
Rabbi Angela Buchdahl: The Cries of Isaac and Ishmael
We can feel brokenhearted for the suffering of the children of Isaac and of Ishmael. We must.
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.
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.
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,
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
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.
Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis: Beware Rich Men Quoting the Bible to Punish the Poor
There is never a suggestion, of course, that the rich, who have functionally stolen people’s wages and engorged themselves by denying them healthcare, are in any way to blame.
James Crews: Light and Dark
Half-awake, I lose myself in a pool
of late morning sun and leaf-shadows
flashing on the floor outside my bedroom,
what the Japanese call komorebi—light
and dark held in the same container
of a single moment, as we hold them in us,
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer: Design
Whatever is sacred, I feel it in canyons,
these earthen temples to surrender—
such holy architecture
with their deep and ancient silence
