Laure-Anne Bosselaar: About My Birthday
when the last leaves let go, let go,
have all let go, & it’s almost winter again —
don’t remember my birthday
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.
Barbara Crooker: Gravy
Hand the wooden baton
to one of your daughters; it’s time for her
to start learning this music, the bubble and
seethe as it plays the score.
Barbara Hamby: Ode to Red and Speedy
Who can remember all the selves stuffed into the miraculous
sack of skin?
Sally Bliumis-Dunn: Week One
She is fine like a ringlet of fiddlehead fern
before it unfurls in the summer forest
Carmel Mawle: The Calisia
When Mama and Baba pulled us from under their bed, we stood where our wall had been and looked over the smoking city.
Alma Luz Villanueva: I Sleep with my Buck Knife
It all began with my full-blood Yaqui Indian grandmother, Mamacita, from Sonora, Mexico, who raised me in San Francisco.
Barbara Crooker: Who Do You Carry?
On city streets, the homeless unfurl
their sleeping bags like hungry tongues.
Sally Bliumis-Dunn: Ouija
my palm beneath your palm
along the arc of your pregnant belly
as though my hand were the planchette
on a Ouija board
Desne A. Crossley: Old Fist, Daniel and My Mom
Beneath the mildly disruptive playfulness, he was a bright kid waiting to be encouraged.
Angele Ellis: “I lived in the dark” | In Grace Notes, Naomi Shihab Nye finds the music in poems about families and the incidents and accidents of personal history
All poetry begins in song, as Naomi Shihab Nye reminds the reader, starting with the title of her latest collection, 117 mostly brief free verse poems that like songs, are both accessible and mysterious.
Margo Berdeshevsky: God Bless the Child That’s Got His Own
He says — you will let go he will let go the branch when he is
Ready I nod, yes, he says, climbing the hill from the sea
Where he has gone to wash distance and salt before it comes
Video: Hair Tie, Egg, Homework Books
As a model student in her elementary school, 11-year-old Lin Yuqi is assigned to give a speech about her family at the Parent’s Meeting tonight. But after Lin finds out that she shares the same secret with a mischievous classmate, she starts to have second thoughts.
Barbara Crooker: Pentimento
In the lost rooms of my childhood,
cinnamon and nutmeg float in the air
