Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer: Letter to the Others in the Dark
I am writing not to send you light,
but to let you know you are not alone
in the darkness. I am here, too,
scribbling with no sight, no certainty
Video: Landline
Landline is a short documentary about the only helpline in the UK for gay farmers.
Valerie Bacharach: Venice
My husband and I sit in Piazza San Marco, sip overpriced coffee
in morning sun, and at home my friend loses pieces
of herself each hour
Mary B. Moore: The Birds of Cutting
I’m tired today and blue to boot.
Nothing buoys me, yesses my no’s.
Even the cardinal on the fence,
a dusky girl, isn’t all red
like cardinal boys
Kathryn Levy: Three Poems
Whatever you searched for
will never be found. Whatever
memories hidden in the
chest in the attic mustn’t be taken
out anymore.
Ellery Akers: Four Prose Poems
Each of us is a struck bell that still reverberates. Walk down the street, and everyone who passes you is echoing inside.
Toi Derricotte: Invisible Dreams
I have to make a
place for my body in
my body.
James Wright: A Note Left in Jimmy Leonard’s Shack
Near the dry river’s water-mark we found
Your brother Minnegan,
Flopped like a fish against the muddy ground.
Elizabeth Romero: O’Brien’s Funeral Parlor
The family, humble and resigned as a canvas jacket:
Their faces full of a still, impassive sorrow
GEORGE YANCY: How Can Philosophy Speak to a World in Crisis? The Answer May Lie in Our Bodies
Whether we are ill, depressed, anxious, suffering from injustice, a refugee, incarcerated — having contact with beauty can lift our spirits, rehumanizing us.
Marilyn Monroe: Fragments
my beaded rays have the colors I’ve
seen in a painting—ah life they
have cheated you
James Davis May: Out Too Far
His wife, he’ll find out later, is worried
he hates them. How to tell her
that he sometimes doesn’t know how
he’s ended up in bed?
Jennifer Franklin: As Antigone
I will not walk away.
The moment the nurse
pressed your splotched
body into my arms,
your needs fixed my fate.
Robert Wrigley: Self-Pity
Sometimes, in private—another room at least,
another building all the better—you can bask
in the balm and rage of it, you can as a dog does
roll in it like a dead fish on the grass
