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.
Dawn Potter: The Way We Live Now
a man solitary as a grieving
arrow types
a text to his daughter and
the text feathers into the ether
Laurence Musgrove: Surely
wondering what we’d
have to do, to leave behind,
to lose, to grieve without stopping
Mandy Fessenden-Brauer: Funeral in Gaza
I’d been in Gaza only a few days when I attended a funeral with my husband who was working with UNRWA. Outside the wake house, soldiers were revving up their … Continue reading
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
Laure-Anne Bosselaar: Brief
It happens so often: there — somewhere
in a line, waiting room or store — I see you,
& it’s something about your work-wrecked
hands, cow-lick, the perfect curl of your lips
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer: The Medicine of Surrender
It’s like opening the dictionary
to the word heaven. Or obliteration.
And knowing it’s the same thing.
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
Michael Simms: Against Prayer
Okay,
God of crib death
and dirty needles,
of heroin and fentanyl,
God of twisted steel
burning beside the road
Connie Post: Auto Immune
One part of the body
turns against the other
Liza Katz Duncan: The Uncles
I’m forgetting others, I know.
One had a scar near his eye in the shape of a bird.
One, a firefighter, had tattooed the word
mercy, and fed the feral cats.
Michael Simms: Ishmael
I’m not prepared to measure grief
like grains of darkness
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer: Tonight, When I Turn Right on Ogden
By the time I turn onto the highway toward home
it is fifteen years ago
and my father is sitting in his favorite chair
