Living

You’re fifteen and nowhere in a town on the edge of pitiful lands stripped of fruit. The burger van’…

I was a forty-one-year-old rabbit
that year, which was said to be unlucky
for the rabbits to go face-to…

I’m not the first man to lose his father
slowly, not the first to wonder
when I walk in the room if the…

You’d never call the branches
arms, though in certain
lights don’t pine and man
look like hands

conjoined…

The money of  the mind is attention, maybe.
Which is not, initially, where I thought I’d begin,
but we…

The doctor tells her what she can’t eat
no grains no nuts no beans no sugar a tomato is OK
but no skins…

Darius Atefat-Peckham on crocheting, masculinity, and the aftermath of loss. 

Keetje Kuipers on becoming a single mother by choice, gardening topless, and leaping without looking.

i

The last time I lost you, I had turned
To salt. The hospice nurses all assured
An easier passing…

I'm a sea since I could never have been a river
An unchanneled sea
of green merriments
and solitary depths…

Tiana Clark on divorce, joy, and taking up space on the page.

miss you calling me at work
leaving stupid jokes on my phone

like the one about the Arapaho, the Navajo…

Unto seventy years and seven,
   Hide your double birthright well—
You, that are the brat of Heaven
   And …

What if you come
Again and swell
The throat of some
Mute bird;
How shall I tell?
How shall I know.
That it is so,
Having heard?

Rebecca Lindenberg on diabetes, a final phone call, and letting yourself fall in love.

"A car" "awash with blood" "Blood at our feet" "& I
& others" "have small springs" "of blood from our…

In church
we said Satan, get thee behind
and I always laughed. A demon child
with a twisted mouth,

You may find her behind 

         Rowan Oak, a shadow 

              of fortress where then now 

         you find no real entry place. 

Every morning opening the newspaper, I am faced
with the thin line that divides disaster and deprivation
from a world of luminous wealth. Tuesday, January 29th,
for instance, bodies, many of them children, lie on the ground
They drowned in the canal trying to escape a weapons depot fire
and explosion in Lagos. Their heads are twisted in straw and dust
near the feet of on-lookers whose cries we cannot hear