Molly Fisk: She Lived to See
ate only bites but
always well: warm boysenberry pie,
bone broth matzoh ball soup
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.
Daniel Burston: John Prine, Working Class Poet (1947-2020)
John Prine was a national treasure, whose songs about love, loss and aging – many written while he was still a relatively young man! – reflect his working class roots. But even so, they have a universal and timeless relevance.
Chard deNiord: Last Goodbye in the Time of Corona
The darkness arrived without your voice
or touch, my love, and yet I heard
your voice and felt your hand in mine.
Molly Fisk: Elegy (for Leah)
her infinite soprano
and my street drawl voicing words that could
depress a saint
Connie Post: How to Sort the Living from the Dead
Forget all the nonsense
about eyes opened or closed
or breathing
or brain waves
Sharon Fagan McDermott: Orchid Room, Phipps Conservatory
Grandma lived to be ninety-three
and wore the fabric of that tale to a soft sheen
with her retelling. Where does the past lie?
Sydney Lea: Passing the Arts and Crafts Fair
There aren’t many like him anymore, the handy, soft-spoken old ones, who still know how to farm, how to raise up a house you can live in, how to still-hunt a whitetail.
Louie Skipper: The Beginning
I keep trying to persuade my father
into a better opinion of me now that he is dead.
Edna St. Vincent Millay: Dirge without Music
Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind…
Miriam Levine: Candlewood
We go into the dark and the dark opens.
Boats tipped with light and moon on the water.
Elena Karina Byrne: Reality may still be unacceptable Gerhard Richter
A Repeating Dream I’m Belly-Down at Eleven
beneath barbwire like bedsprings during night-climbs
Sharon Fagan McDermott: This Against the Night
Sweet hyssop and the sweltering hives
from which sail bees, their resolute flight
into July, into my garden.
Elizabeth Kirschner: Jones Beach
He went out. Into the ocean’s black maw. To save. To rescue. Didn’t, as they say, come back. Death is funny like that, precise, dissolute.
