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.
Luray Gross: If Two People Are Aware of the Rising Moon
When his mind grew empty
and his heartbeat slowed to a vague stutter,
our father no longer walked the fields at night.
Carolyn Gregory: Listening to John Coltrane on my Mother’s Death Day
Swirling, confident, those sax notes stretch and blow
above the drums, full of his blue notes,
fifty years ago, new as now.
Carolyn Gregory: Leaving the Theatre of Dreams (for Peter)
Tonight I walk through spring sadness, the nostalgia of dreams remembered and foregone, familiar places where we wrote our own epitaph, misspoken lines and rooms seen in the wrong light … Continue reading
John Samuel Tieman: Elegy for a Poet
Michael Castro 1945 – 2018 while the snow wants to melt winter loiters and I will listen I will listen for you when I need a noun a sudden muscle an animal can use to … Continue reading
Edna St. Vincent Millay: Time does not bring relief
Time does not bring relief; you all have lied Who told me time would ease me of my pain! I miss him in the weeping of the rain; I want … Continue reading
Philip F. Clark: Lacrimosa
Where I grew up, wakes were a sparring ground— furor was the only defense to grief. Someone had to fight the rant of all those flowers. That is how … Continue reading
