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.
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
