David Hassler: Vocata George
My clamped jaw, in its extreme symptoms, is like a fire door, a castle gate that has slammed shut.
Diana Raab: Lessons from My Grandmother
I was ten years old the morning I found my grandmother dead.
Jennifer Franklin: As Antigone
I will not walk away.
The moment the nurse
pressed your splotched
body into my arms,
your needs fixed my fate.
David Kirby: More Than This
you three must be thirsty,
come in and get a drink, and the cowboy says okay,
but what is this place, and the guy says it’s heaven
Barbara Edelman: White-Throated Sparrow
Though she is dead
she is buying me a car
and this buying makes her happy
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.
Valerie Bacharach: Chaos
There is no word for parents who have lost a child. Our language is chaotic. We are not widowed or orphaned. We are without, we are incomplete.
Nneka M. Okona: The Imposition of Black Grief
For Black people in the United States, grief and loss are intertwined with our very being. Our ancestors knew the trauma of loss intimately…
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.
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.
Video: The Ref
A referee struggles to maintain control over a 2nd grade basketball game.
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer: The Prayers
I had not imagined drowning
was the way to reach the shore.
Elizabeth Gargano: Why We Should Try Talking to the Dead
After my father’s death, my mother kept talking to him.
Neil Shepard: Local Freeze
Flat lines of black clouds
rolled over the Everglades, pelting the land with cold rain,
then, briefly, almost impossibly, hail, over the wetlands and dredged
fields, reminding us how fragile the grapefruits and oranges.
