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.
Chard deNiord: See How Brightly The Leaves Fall With Grief
How long then short the days grow across the Earth.
Bhikshuni Vasetthi: Oh, My Heart
I called out to my grief and drew it toward me.
I held my grief and gently rocked it.
Shh, I said. There, there. There, there.
Larry Levis | At the Grave of My Guardian Angel: St. Louis Cemetery, New Orleans
And without beauty, Bakunin will go on making his forlorn & unreliable little bombs in the cold, & Oswald will adjust
The lenses on the scope of his rifle, the one
Friend he has carried with him all the way out of his childhood,
The silent wood of its stock as musical to him in its grain as any violin.
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer: An Open Thank You Letter to Kristen Who Works at the Cemetery
There are moments so flooded with tenderness
every wall around our heart collapses
from the beauty of it
Michelle Bitting: Now at Holiday Time I Think About the Moment I Heard You Passed On
a stone’s throw from lots
where talented Sharon Tate expired and Jim Morrison
fluttered psychedelic, fiery birds rising from the boulevard
of broken wings
Barbara Crooker: Star of Wonder, Star of Light
It’s Christmas, the year before the accident, when the earth
still seemed fixed. My husband and children are hanging
lights on the big pine tree
Michael Simms: The Pecan Grove
he taught me
the geometry of carpentry
the mysteries
of plumbing, told me
dirty jokes
Peter Makuck: Tiger Swallowtails
clusters of fluttering wings
yellow with black stripes
in and out
of the white and orange lantana
Wayne Karlin: Butch in Autumn
Run ahead again,
old friend,
I’ll catch up with you later.
Laure-Anne Bosselaar: Earbug
Ah, it’s back. It hadn’t hummed in my head for years —
that achingly joyful accordion tango.
Nancy Krygowski: “Here’s a Partial List of Mass Shootings in the United States So Far This Year”
Here’s the full list of the people the murdered have kissed.
Here’s a pair of slippers made of birds’ beaks, ear plugs made of screams.
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer: The Prayers
I had not imagined drowning
was the way to reach the shore.
Vox Populi 