Barbara Huntington: Our Big Toes
I’d let that old woman repeat her crime if
I could see
Fred’s happy faces
one more time
Laure-Anne Bosselaar: Leaving It There
I stop weeding, stand still a while, hands on hips,
because it’s back again — that feeling of elation
tangled with grief.
Robert Walicki: Asleep
Another knuckle white morning,
in a neighborhood of slammed doors,
the salt covered cars and trucks in a haze,
saying prayers to the God of paychecks and Friday afternoons.
Mary Wollstonecraft: It is justice, not charity, that is wanting in the world!
I do not wish women to have power over men; but over themselves.
Alexis Rhone Fancher: Out of Order
Promise me, my sister says. That you’ll be there if something happens to me. I know she worries about the fate of her children if she becomes injured, succumbs to a virus or is killed in a crash. Anything’s possible, she says. For better or worse, her sperm donor’s out of the picture.
Video: Parkinson’s Together
For a long time, I had been wanting to create a series of portraits of my husband, who is living with Parkinson’s disease. Portraits where I honor Hal as a person – his strength and his vulnerability. And portraits where I express how it feels for me to be both a witness and a care partner in this.
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer: The Partners
After thirty years, she knows
he will speak with his mouth full.
He knows her stomach will gurgle
in the silence before they sleep.
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.
Joseph Bathanti: High Mass
Winter Sundays,
when my father was on strike from steel,
he and my mother woke late,
then rose and prepared for high mass at Saints Peter and Paul.
Joseph Bathanti: Steady Daylight
Today in Heaven,
my father turned 105.
Finally working steady daylight
Edwin Arlington Robinson: Eros Turannos
She fears him, and will always ask
What fated her to choose him
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
Larry Levis: Family Romance
Abstaining clouds that passed, & kept
Their own counsel, we
Were different, we kept our own counsel.
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
