Connie Post: Estrangement
you watch a burning city
from far away
and notice a pigeon flying towards you
gaining speed
pulling the sky’s edges with it
Laure-Anne Bosselaar: At the end of the Breakwater
Let the day open so wholly
to light.
James Crews: I Keep the Window Open
Life’s too fragile
to waste on money or importance,
handing over the hours that will never
be returned to us.
Laure-Anne Bosselaar: Tonight’s Dinner Companions
you, old poet, gone, whose lines I often
say aloud against the ocean’s constant shush
Barbara Edelman: White-Throated Sparrow
Though she is dead
she is buying me a car
and this buying makes her happy
Liza Katz Duncan: Bayshore Elegy
You’d have to be crazy to call home
a strip of sand that will be underwater
in fifty years and oh,
my God, what does that make me?
David Hassler: Intensive Care
Children under the age of fourteen weren’t allowed in the ICU. I was eleven, and my brother was thirteen, but no nurse or doctor was going to stop us from seeing our mother.
James Crews: A Few Things I Have Learned
Watching birds will save you on a daily basis—the shaggy barred owl clinging to a pine branch with its deadly claws, eyes lazing in the glaze of a winter morning, head swiveling back and forth.
Fred Shaw: Comfort
Without warning, the busboy died
in his bed after school, the genes of his heart
finished ticking toward failure.
Michael Simms: Daisy
After you died, I pulled a copy of Gatsby
From your shelf — torn, underlined, smudged
With marginalia — but still beautiful
In an unbound unglued sort of way.
Kim Ports Parsons: May the Particles of My Body Travel the Endless Conduits
When I die, lay me in the loam under the big oak
on the path through the woods, deep down in the endless
flow of talk among the trees there…
Laura McCullough: Hero With Only One Face
He tells me in his diminishing days, death not yet active,
but clearly begun, about his siblings, family shufflings,
foster homes, the orphanage. Who said they would
but then could not, who promised this & forgot that
Kate Daniels: The Poem
Niobe had just lost her son.
To help herself, she read a poem
to those assembled in the funeral home
James Crews: New Year
It’s so cold on this January morning
the condensation in the corner of each window
has frozen to the glass, cannot be wiped away.
Vox Populi 