James Crews: After Receiving Bad News from a Friend
To offer what we can,
even when a friend lives far away,
to say: I will hold you inside myself
as you pass through this new gate.
James Crews: Mud-Puddling
I don’t want to read another book
or listen to another podcast promising
a better life, the road to happiness.
I just want to love my life as it is
Desne A. Crossley: Alzheimer’s and Missing Love (2015-2017, 1996 & 1950)
Watched the movie Hidden Figures (when the first black women worked in the Nasa space program) and almost cried. My father was a rocket scientist, something I didn’t realize until his brain was already gone to Alzheimer’s.
Delmore Schwartz: O Love, Sweet Animal
O Love, dark animal,
With your strangeness go
Like any freak or clown:
Appease the child in her
Because she is alone
Rashida James-Saadiya: Anti-ICE Organizing Is Creating Counter-Institutions Based on Care
The task now is not to burn brighter or faster, but to build the collective capacity to withstand what’s coming.
Cynthia Atkins: When Harry Met Sally
A light quaked on earth, because when the waitress
gasped and blushed, we gasped and blushed,
sitting in the plush dark aisles to our interiors.
James Crews: The Slightest Kindness
We were walking the icy streets,
talking about the ways our country
has betrayed us again—promises
unkept, laws broken beyond repair.
John Guzlowski: Love Your Neighbor?
Yes, Jesus said, “Love your neighbor as yourself,” but, of course, he’s not the only one who said it. Almost every religion has that phrase or something like it at its core.
Tony Gloeggler: Magnitude
the first time he ran to me, grabbed
my hand when I picked him up
at school, the first morning
he walked into our Brooklyn
bedroom to cuddle between us
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.
Elizabeth Romero: Morning
My friend Peter and I
Argued about love one time
Before he died.
Stuart Dischell: Love’s Dominion
The cabdriver who is a wit
Does not really know that elephant
Tusks and gold bars are packed inside
Love’s trunk along with the bodies
Of Love’s family. Okay, it’s books…
Meg Pokrass: Three Poems
When I said, I miss America
I meant that what is nestled in my brain feels like a harbor.
Edna St. Vincent Millay: Say what you will, and scratch my heart to find
Laugh at the unshed leaf, say what you will,
Call me in all things what I was before,
A flutterer in the wind, a woman still;
I tell you I am what I was and more.
