Connie Post: Estrangement
you watch a burning city
from far away
and notice a pigeon flying towards you
gaining speed
pulling the sky’s edges with it
Laure-Anne Bosselaar: At the end of the Breakwater
Let the day open so wholly
to light.
Diana Raab: Lessons from My Grandmother
I was ten years old the morning I found my grandmother dead.
Michael Simms: Prospero needs a little nap
Vox Populi will endure, albeit at a slower pace.
David Hassler: Intensive Care
Children under the age of fourteen weren’t allowed in the ICU. I was eleven, and my brother was thirteen, but no nurse or doctor was going to stop us from seeing our mother.
Valerie Bacharach: Chaos
There is no word for parents who have lost a child. Our language is chaotic. We are not widowed or orphaned. We are without, we are incomplete.
Nneka M. Okona: The Imposition of Black Grief
For Black people in the United States, grief and loss are intertwined with our very being. Our ancestors knew the trauma of loss intimately…
Kim Ports Parsons: May the Particles of My Body Travel the Endless Conduits
When I die, lay me in the loam under the big oak
on the path through the woods, deep down in the endless
flow of talk among the trees there…
Laura McCullough: Hero With Only One Face
He tells me in his diminishing days, death not yet active,
but clearly begun, about his siblings, family shufflings,
foster homes, the orphanage. Who said they would
but then could not, who promised this & forgot that
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer: An Open Thank You Letter to Kristen Who Works at the Cemetery
There are moments so flooded with tenderness
every wall around our heart collapses
from the beauty of it
Gary Fincke: A Murder of Crows
Driving home, I see all of them
By the highway, pecking at
Whatever is splayed out and torn
Wayne Karlin: Butch in Autumn
Run ahead again,
old friend,
I’ll catch up with you later.
Arlene Weiner: Pinky
Last week I took a shovel from a prepared heap,
scooped earth easily, turned, threw it
onto your coffin, plain pine.
Elizabeth Gargano: Why We Should Try Talking to the Dead
After my father’s death, my mother kept talking to him.
