Philip Terman: Tell Them Everything
Lucky she was, not to spend time in an Iranian
Jail, fortunate to emigrate and meet my brother
And fall in love, a Jew and an Iranian
Sydney Lea: Remorse
Do you ever recall some minor misdemeanor or even one you committed only in mind, and –however absurdly– half believe it contributed to a disaster?
Naomi Shihab Nye: Generations
At the end of an unseasonably warm day
New Year’s Eve 2017
I stood in my kitchen holding
one wooden spoon.
Robbi Nester: Delicious
For me,
love has to rise like bread dough, worked until
it has a tender crumb. It’s not simple, though maybe
simplicity might come, if I work hard enough.
Chana Bloch: A Marriage
Theirs was the one with the noisy bedsprings.
How does a child solve a riddle like that?
Scritchity-screech
—are they fighting again?
Video: Dear Philadelphia
With the help of their family, friends, and faith, three fathers unravel the incomparable partnership of forgiveness and community in North Philadelphia.
Dawn Potter: Why, as the evening steps forward,
as the late noise of traffic, of shrill birdsong,
dies away, do I always recall
those brief summers, when the old folks
reclined in the grass on the hill
Desne A. Crossley: Something I Came Across
Yesterday, I was culling through papers to throw out and came across a letter from my mother to her father. She’s trying to cushion the news that no one will tell him. He’s dying of cancer.
Sandy Solomon: Making Soup
Who would have guessed before this year
how cheerful this simple chore would feel
now that the sick room’s silence starts
beyond the swinging kitchen door.
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer: Talking with My Daughter about Grief
We lie in the dark
and speak about anything
but what I ache to speak about.
Joseph Bathanti: High Mass
Winter Sundays,
when my father was on strike from steel,
he and my mother woke late,
then rose and prepared for high mass at Saints Peter and Paul.
Linda Parsons: Two Poems for Christmas
the light hasn’t always been easy to find—
haloed fires of childhood, my walk
on coals to the marriage pyre, parents
passed to flame and ash. All have sparked
the change ahead, all have lit the way.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti: I Genitori Perduti
Souls transmigrated maybe
from Hudson’s shrouded shores
across all the silent years—
Which one’s my maybe mafioso father
Andrew Reginald Hairston: Sweet Potato Pie
Having gone public with your bisexuality the month prior — and blocking your parents and sister at the same time — the memories would have to suffice
