Ma Yongbo: Father’s Little Boat (English and Chinese)
She sits beside him all night,
watching the Father’s darkness,
listening to the careful breath of the dark,
listening to the broken winds of another world.
Meg Kearney (Two Poems)
When he was dying my little brother
said cancer was “the sins of our mother”
visited upon him. What’s also true:
her heart was the stone rolled away from the tomb.
Ann Fisher-Wirth: Two Inaugural Poems
Before I lived in the South I had never
smelled road kill, that sweet sick
that climbs inside your nostrils
and colonizes your brain, so had never
thought about vultures.
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.
