Denise Levertov: Clouds
as if death had lit a pale light
in your flesh, your flesh
was cold to my touch, or not cold
but cool, cooling
George Drew: I Know You’re in Detroit
Aretha, I apologize for having never written a poem
for or about you, not in all the Hit Parades of years
I’ve grooved to you…
Sandy Solomon: Ghazal
A night of ghazals comes to an end to fill with birds.
As the sky blues, their calls braid in New Jersey.
Philip Levine: Red Dust
I do not believe in sorrow;
it is not American.
Jason Irwin: Cucumbers
“I still can’t bring myself to buy cucumbers. He loved them.” she says, but never mentions the car accident, or how she had blamed me for your drinking again…
Molly Fisk: She Lived to See
ate only bites but
always well: warm boysenberry pie,
bone broth matzoh ball soup
Abby Zimet: John Prine as Tender Poet
“If his songs were allowed to exist in the world—so simply written, so profoundly beautiful —surely there was room for other good, decent things, too.”
Miriam Levine: Invisible Kisses
And survivors with numbers tattooed on their arms, straight as a
bookkeeper’s sum,
the ink indelibly blue, unlike the blessedly changing ocean.
Stephen Dobyns: Laugh
What he wished was to have his ashes flushed
down the ladies’ room toilet of Syracuse City Hall,
which would so clog the pipes that the resulting
blast of glutinous broth would douse the place clean
Molly Fisk: Elegy (for Leah)
her infinite soprano
and my street drawl voicing words that could
depress a saint
Chris Moran: After Reading Akhmatova
What can I name my grief, again, today?
A nickel frozen in the sidewalk?
A tumbling paper bag?
Connie Post: How to Sort the Living from the Dead
Forget all the nonsense
about eyes opened or closed
or breathing
or brain waves
Walt Whitman: When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d
For the sweetest, wisest soul of all my days and lands—and this for his dear sake,
Lilac and star and bird twined with the chant of my soul,
There in the fragrant pines and the cedars dusk and dim.
