Mark Bibbins
How old are you, sweet knot of toads, how old.
Will Frazier
When I looked at him, a voice in my head said
This is your dad, he is speaking, you are on earth, this is your life
Phillip B. Williams
Maybe madness make my mouth mine?
Matthea Harvey
Now, as we file in for our first journey together, even this choice of fourteen floors
floors me.
Carl Phillips
Having had their moment or, if luckier, the better part of a day in the sun as proverbed, it was time to move on.
Or does fear, instructional at last, clear a way for vision?
Linda Gregerson
If half the workers at Tyson Meats come down with the virus we still have a plan for protecting the owners from lawsuits.
Dan Chiasson
A mayfly born at the break of dawn Dies when the sun goes down. A tortoise on an English lawn Outlives his master’s son’s son’s son.
Stanley Plumly
No one died, nor was ever going to die.
Jeffrey Gray
The trail gone cold, your voice asleep in your throat,
She had to have shopped for the hose, measured it, fit it with duct tape to the pipe and run it through the back
Wendy Xu
covetous old knots on a string still tied to my grandfather’s big toe in Shandong
It was getting late, and you could feel the strain of all the things that hadn’t happened yet not happening
Dana Levin
And then I see it: to be a hero is to be a child of a mother —
Emily Fragos
I admit it, my life, I was totally taken with you. I went along, laughing and smiling, or sometimes on the verge of tears
Jane Wong
mewing a downy echo: every dead thing is in need of more mourning.
Fady Joudah
someone you know is on the brink of suicide, of murder, is it also not a national question?
Richie Hofmann
I lunch alone on chunks of venison. The Black Death feels distant, like you.
I covered his eyes with my lips, but he pushed me away (“there’s no returning from there”)
He sings and speaks with the voice of a priest, father, or devil.
Adriana Socoski
I was up in God’s country, up on a mountain early and, of course, I fell in love
Speech is the tree line of your easy chair—
The tipsy slurring of worlds AWOL from fixed positions.
Robert Frost
From the Review in 1949.
Eavan Boland
This is not death. It is the terrible
Suspension of life.
Carlos Andrés Gómez
Sometimes I search for the exact dayI stopped dreaming in the language that sings my name.
Jenny Xie
But slowly we disciplined the mouth Tamed it into movement
Surely for this reason death must announce itself
again and again in such sour language
Shane McCrae
We are the ghosts of who comes after us
The stones is dead the stones that were too big
For human beings to move the angel saw
The humans in their freedom killed them both
And pounded with their bloody fists on the splintering gates
