Lisa Suhair Majaj: For the Dead Among Us
We will keep you alive
in our longing, in our breath.
Margo Berdeshevsky: God Bless the Child That’s Got His Own
He says — you will let go he will let go the branch when he is
Ready I nod, yes, he says, climbing the hill from the sea
Where he has gone to wash distance and salt before it comes
Laure-Anne Bosselaar: Widow’s Bedroom
Light puddles over the old floor planks, then climbs
the wall behind his place in our bed, & glows there.
Past noon, slow shadows douse that light & push it
out of the room. As if they knew he won’t come back.
Larry Levis: Elegy with a Chimneysweep Falling Inside it
If the soul had a written history, nothing would have happened:
A bird would still be riding the back of a horse,
And the horse would go on grazing in a field
Tony Gloeggler: Anyway
After we dropped dirt
on my father’s coffin
the long line of cars
drove back to the house.
Sean Sexton: Unrecognizable
A friend of my sister attended the reading—
sat in the back of the hall—coming forth only after
everyone had gone.
Laure-Anne Bosselaar: This Longing for Him
Another dawn. Fists in my pockets, I head east
into this street of bungalows
as if I belonged here, among the hundred windows
lit one by one
James Crews: Finding my Mother
The day you passed away, I stumbled
along icy sidewalks, searching for any
sign of you
Michael Simms: Leaving Walden
Is it true the distance between atoms
is proportionate to the distance between stars
and the world we know is mostly empty space?
Donna Hilbert: Two Poems
You are the rosemary I add to the soup:
how you pressed pungent bristles
between thumb and finger
Barbara Hamby: Ode on Killing Sadness
the emcee said at the start
of the evening, “Here we are killing
sadness,” and the music did take the sting
out of the night
Pascale Petit: Salt Bride
How long has Earth floated in her salt dress?
When did her bridal gown crystallise,
weighing her down like an anchor
inside a dead sea?
Alice Friman: Puddles
As if overnight, the flowering pear tree
is flowering. A froth of white.
Michael Simms: Snow
her father sitting alone in his underwear
having stripped off his blackened clothes
and leaving them on the back porch,
white skin of his legs, black dust on his face
