Laure-Anne Bosselaar: The Garden
Because everything I learned from the stained
glass windows I was told to kneel under
still remains thorned & stained & torn,
& all the teachings I was told to believe, still
leave me dis-believing & I wish it were not so —
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer: Letter to the Others in the Dark
I am writing not to send you light,
but to let you know you are not alone
in the darkness. I am here, too,
scribbling with no sight, no certainty
Laure-Anne Bosselaar: Petition for this Day
May my modest routines appease me today, I who
raged against them for so long —
Stuart Dischell: Pleasure Harvest
Nights were difficult when her absence curled beside him,
A long-legged question no longer to be answered.
Sandy Solomon: While You’re Away
Were it a question not of days but weeks
I’d learn, I’m sure, to sprawl mid-bed, the way,
before we met, I did.
Alexis Rhone Fancher: Watch your back my dead mother warns
I was in my late teens, off to college up north. I’m hoping you’re rid of M for good, my mother said. But he wanted to move north with me, and begged me to move in with him, that we would go to school together. Me, desperate to be a solo act. The look on his face when I turned him down, unforgettable.
Betsy Sholl: Liminal
In Dante, some stanzas so blaze with light,
reading them, you feel your pupils constrict.
It’s like walking along the shore, ocean
flashing on your left, sun straight ahead
flooding your eyes
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer: Some Nights Missing You
like the letter that doesn’t come,
the one I would carefully slit open
and slowly unfold
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
Elizabeth Romero: Another Night
Like a deranged animal
the refrigerator growls on
Edwin Arlington Robinson: Richard Cory
Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favored, and imperially slim.
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.
Chelsea Cleveland: Loneliness as Fermentation
Just as foods undergo significant changes, evolving into something more intricate and nuanced, we, too, experience compelling transformations in our lives.
