Fred Everett Maus: Growing Up
Until I left for college, I lived in the same home with my mom and dad. The house was built in 1924. My grandfather was the first owner.
John Guzlowski: Fear
You could hear the fear in my mom’s voice. She feared everything, the sky in the morning, a drink of water, a sparrow singing in a dream, me whistling some stupid little Mickey Mouse Club tune I picked up on TV.
Joseph Bathanti: Maz’s Homer
Sister Ann Francis, my teacher, whom I do not like at all, though she will not prove the worst of them, slips us word that Sister Geralda, the ferocious school principal, who teaches eighth grade, has granted amnesty for the last ten minutes of the school day. We are to hurry home to witness the climax of the World Series.
Frank Lehner: Mrs. Nussbaum’s Monkey
Pops never said much, but there he was in his T-shirt and loose boxers telling Jessers about the Easter Tuesday night he lost his mother and taking the streetcar to go to work because there was nothing to do until the next day, and the plant owner only gave two days off for deaths.
Shaheen Dil: From Letters to my Younger Self
Today my three-card spread says there’s a Twinkie in my future again
Bill Knott: The Closet
I shall find room enough here
By excluding myself; by excluding myself, I’ll grow.
Video: Opulent Round Edible Object
A boy discovers a glitch which enables him to exchange cotton balls for cookies.
Tony Gloeggler: Fade Away
In 1964, my father and uncle
loaded the U HAUL and we left
Bed Stuy with all the other white
people and moved to Long Island.
Angele Ellis: “I lived in the dark” | In Grace Notes, Naomi Shihab Nye finds the music in poems about families and the incidents and accidents of personal history
All poetry begins in song, as Naomi Shihab Nye reminds the reader, starting with the title of her latest collection, 117 mostly brief free verse poems that like songs, are both accessible and mysterious.
Fred Johnston: With My Father on Broadway in the Rain
I wanted to be back in our hotel room
Looking out the single window from that height
Knowing I could not fall, that if all gave way I could always fly
Barbara Crooker: On Teaching Poetry Classes in My Old Elementary School in Honor of Its 100th Anniversary
Yes, I know my mother isn’t there, as I walk up and down Main Street;
she’s moved to a different zip code, the one with no returns.
James Crews: Homeless
How do you pack up a whole house,
help your parents haul your toys thrown
in boxes from the liquor store, stuff them
in the back of the car in the middle
of the night because they can’t afford
to pay the rent they owe?
Naomi Shihab Nye: Little Farmer
how right he was about slowness,
the path of sunlight through leaves,
how dirt has always befriended me,
Baron Wormser: Staggering
When each of us was alone, imagination often kicked in. Where else can a child go? What else can a child do? When asked what one was thinking, a child could answer with the blessed word, “Nothing.”
