Robert Frost: A Servant to Servants
My father’s brother wasn’t right. They kept him
Locked up for years back there at the old farm.
I’ve been away once – yes, I’ve been away.
The State Asylum.
Jose Padua: These Years of Thinking Dangerously
When
the beautiful confusion of dreams becomes a stranger
to my waking hours I start to panic.
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.
Daniel Lawless: The Gun My Sister Killed Herself With
Was a cubit long and weighed half as much
As an average newborn U.S. baby.
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?
Sonali Kolhatkar: Abolishing the Nation’s Largest Jail System
L.A. County activists are working to replace violent jails with mental health facilities, and to reallocate funding from incarceration toward social services.
Michael Simms: God, Poetry and Trauma
In the 19th century, if you asked a scientist whether he believed in God, he would have answered, ‘Of course, I don’t believe in God, I’m a scientist.” But if you ask a scientist today whether he believes in God, he would answer, “Of course, I believe in God, I’m a scientist.”
John Clare: The Instinct of Hope
Is there another world for this frail dust
To warm with life and be itself again?
Patricia A. Nugent: Father with a Gun
Years working in human resources convinced me that no school employee should have a gun. Period.
Wendy Mnookin: In the Small Rotary
where Route 100 meets School Street,
two cows graze.
Joseph E Davis: Let’s avoid talk of ‘chemical imbalance’ — it’s people in distress
The idea that one’s distress is primarily caused by a neurochemical deficiency that can be corrected by a drug is a fiction. The idea that it explains first-person experience or that it offers some exemption from responsibility is a fiction as well.
Stephen Dobyns: Leaf Blowers
That autumn morning he awoke to the crying
of lost souls that quickly changed to the roar
of leaf blowers up and down the street
Liz Moran: (Harper’s Bazaar)
I watched her for ten long minutes
in Barnes & Noble.
