Paul Christensen: A Diary of Winter
The cold came in silent as an owl. The fences stared out at the clenched landscape with gaping eyes, unlocked gates, a path already flattened out in anticipation of the coming snow.
Lisa Zimmerman: Thinking About Dean Young and the Anthropocene & Another Country
I’m doing my best, balancing hope on the head of a pin,
following those other steadfast travelers exiting the shop, holding
their buzzing phones, their many cups of Joe.
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer: Talking with My Daughter about Grief
We lie in the dark
and speak about anything
but what I ache to speak about.
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.
