Sean Sexton: Shirts
And now I come to wear your clothes, shirts
that no longer fit, you barely wore in the end
arranged in piles to divide and sort, of
three sizes—which was the measure of you?
Byron Hoot: On That Day
In a few days, it will be the anniversary
of my father’s death and I will have
to see if grief visits or stays away.
James Wright: Sappho
Fire does not rest on iron, it drifts like a blue blossom
And catches on my breath;
Coiling, spinning, the blue foam of the gas fire
Writhes like a naked girl
Dawn Potter: Don’t Tell Me You Don’t Know What Love Is
I think back to those nights in Buck Lane, the melodramas of sex and desire, the intense affections but also the cruelties … the ruthlessness of self-absorption.
Dick Westheimer: Skeleton Key
when his bones—
burned and ground to dust—
reassemble, they visit here
and tell me to
clean my room
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.
Majid Naficy: My Silent Buried Treasures
Speak to me, you roots of plum trees!
The barefoot children of summer
And the wandering lambs of fall
Could not witness.
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?
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
Eleanor Lerman: Monday, Tuesday
Aqueous lunar days when the sky was plowed
with stars, days of desire in the dance clubs,
days of luster, days of pearl—when was the last time
you remember our days of paradise? The days
before the demon days of pretty things ran out?
Molly Fisk: Maybe I’ll Just Sing To Him
As the planned flaw in a woven blanket
banishes hubris or lets mischief out,
her breasts greet each other unevenly.
Donna Spruijt-Metz: Birthday with Empty Hands
Today is our firstborn’s birthday—and you
are missing the party.
You’ve been pulled away on
death’s urgent business.
Jordan Smith: These Days
The danger of elegy is that it just tells us what we already know: we lose and suffer and become the subject of the loss and suffering of others. Liam had no patience for what he called the “I fall upon the thorns of life, I bleed” school of poetry.
Sean Sexton: Not
Not the listless woods these days,
their ongoing summer song
same as the year-round sound in my head.
