Tony Gloeggler: Knowledge
He’s unaware he’s built
like a bowling pin,
that his shaved head shines
like Mr. Clean and everybody
stares when he waddles
James Crews: At the Monastery
I want to ask: Would you bow
to the blown-open peony, its petals
strewn like slips of silk in the grass
after last night’s storm?
Tony Gloeggler: Goodbye
no one seemed to accept
or understand I love Jesse,
that the way he will never fit
in the world reminds me of me
Laure-Anne Bosselaar: When the Bed is Made
How mothers, lovers, nurses & hotel maids,
backs aching, have bent over beds for that last
swift tidying.
Michael Simms: Sun Star
After churning all night
I wake to see the sun star
In the window, its perfect
Blossoms full of light
Richard Feynman: Letter to Arline
I find it hard to understand in my mind what it means to love you after you are dead — but I still want to comfort and take care of you — and I want you to love me and care for me. I want to have problems to discuss with you — I want to do little projects with you.
Emmelie Prophète: Pipo
Pipo often talked about fallen friends, their final, frozen, empty vision, almost as if he were feeling his own demise. He was close to and a cousin of Fanfan the Savage, but he was not an active gang member, and should never have died.
Sandy Solomon: My Friend Seems Near Tears
Look at her, so tall and beautiful
when she forgets herself, her whole body
lit with a sloppy, ungovernable brightness
Song of Songs, Canticles 1-8
I am the rose of Sharon, and the lily of the valleys[….]
As the apple tree among the trees of the wood, so is my beloved among the sons. I sat down under his shadow with great delight, and his fruit was sweet to my taste.
Dawn Potter: Arcadia, 1939
warmth of bread baking, a cardinal alight in a branching
oak, white bed, linens floating in air, a table
laid in an arbor’s shade—
Paul Christensen: The Journey We All Must Take
When you’re a knee-scabbed, scruffy looking kid, a tree-climbing ruffian hanging from the neighbor’s crab apple tree and running away from some irate neighbor after soaping up his car windshield, on Halloween, you don’t know it but you are the unacknowledged expert of what it means to be living in your pre-pubescent body.
Carol Frost: Scorn
How had they not been wounded? And wounded they’d convalesced in the same rooms
and bed.
Michael Simms: Portrait of Unknown Couple
He sketched in charcoal
the arch of a shoulder
the movement of a hand
the woman’s head
turned and tilted slightly
toward the man
Adrienne Maree Brown: Murmurations | Love Looks Like Accountability
Racialized capitalism trains us to expect that some people fall through the cracks into unjust suffering; our cultural individualism tells us this is acceptable, as long as we aren’t the ones at the bottom.
