Laure-Anne Bosselaar: Infinitives
To dust it — not often enough. To stare at it — too often.
To never open it anymore. Keep his ashes hidden.
Michael Simms: The Horses
People loved her as they might love
A flag or a map or a story
Of a country of green pastures
And low stone walls
Michael Simms: You Taught Me
you pointed
At the bubbles rising in the pitcher
Of beer to explain consciousness
Which was blurred by that time
Of evening
Baron Wormser: Oona
When you have a dog, you get to participate in another creature’s being, a creature who wants to be with you, a human being.
Doug Anderson: We Get Old, We Get Sick
How we stumble, are glib
in the face of our fear
when we might show
our own raw heart
Terry Blackhawk: So Here
So here I’ve gone and reframed your painting, the one of the street with its tilted telephone poles, the street that led me into sleep so often now bordered by an eggplant purple, very trendy and advised by the decorator to pick up the purples and greens of other pieces in my room…
Toi Derricotte: For my unnamed brother (1943-1943)
you live this
life i’ll live the
next
Tony Gloeggler: What Anyone Knows
Diagnosed
with mental retardation and cerebral
palsy, he spent his early childhood
in Willowbrook hell.
Michael Simms: Uvalde
The swelling and collapsing
Of a small promise more
Tentative than we knew
Carolyn Miller: By the Time
By the time the light reaches us, empty
sunflower fields are pitted with more craters.
Jim Daniels: Strawberry
the final time I saw my mother
she was trying to find
the last strawberry on her plate
Valerie Bacharach: Passover
I lay a Haggadah by a chair,
unoccupied.
Unearth my Seder plate,
place upon it shank bone, egg, parsley,
bitter herbs. My bitter tears.
Jeffrey Harrison: Disconcerting
The word became the mantra of
her last few years, which were, in fact,
often disconcerting: her descent
into dementia, her cancer diagnosis,
her fall, her fractured hip.
Susan Kelly-DeWitt: The Moon Is Doing The Australian Crawl
my mother has worked her way up
through the wave-rungs
of the spirit-corps’ fleshless ladder—
secretary of the afterworld
Vox Populi 