Barbara Hamby: Ode to the ‘Messiah’, Thai Horror Movies, and Everything I Can’t Believe
When I decide to go to hear Handel’s Messiah in London
at the composer’s parish church, my husband says
he’d rather see a Thai horror movie, so we plan to meet later
at our favorite Moroccan lair
Joseph Bathanti: Steady Daylight
Today in Heaven,
my father turned 105.
Finally working steady daylight
Toi Derricotte: Not Forgotten
I love the way the black ants use their dead.
They carry them off like warriors on their steel
backs.
Barbara Crooker: Cathedrale Notre-Dame de Paris
Nearly fifty years ago,
in the wreckage of my first marriage, I lit
a tall white taper, prayed that my husband
would return to himself, keep our family intact,
a prayer that disappeared in the dark vaults
Barbara Hamby: Ode to Red and Speedy
Who can remember all the selves stuffed into the miraculous
sack of skin?
Robert Okaji: Dream Score
I empty my mother’s ashtray of its treasures—
various picks, the broken watch, a mandolin bridge,
that lock of my wife’s hair—then peer through the amber
glass at a distorted day. What looks back at me?
Baruch November: A Gift in the Shallows of the Sea
One night, on Riis Beach,
years ago, I suddenly
proposed to your mother
in the moonlight
Video: Hair Tie, Egg, Homework Books
As a model student in her elementary school, 11-year-old Lin Yuqi is assigned to give a speech about her family at the Parent’s Meeting tonight. But after Lin finds out that she shares the same secret with a mischievous classmate, she starts to have second thoughts.
Desne A. Crossley: O Rosie Girl
it was one thing for a white man to bed a black woman, but unthinkable that he would marry her. And it was commonplace for a black woman to be forced to open her legs to her employer or his sons. But Martha married white and returned home with the man!
Wally Swist: Three Poems for Tevis
I discover what remains
is the light that shines through
Tony Gloeggler: Some of the Things
Bean once told me, he never
hit a woman, as if it was a big
accomplishment.
James Davis May: Out Too Far
His wife, he’ll find out later, is worried
he hates them. How to tell her
that he sometimes doesn’t know how
he’s ended up in bed?
Wally Swist: The Caregiver
the depth of bad
feeling is in proportion
to how good we are
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.
