Paige Lewis - God Stops By

to show me how healthy He’s been. He’s sleeping more. He built his own gym.

Mostly muscle now, He gives me the fat off his steak. I eat because He offers, not

because I need—it’s hard to feel hungry when everything in this world tastes small

and wrong, like rubber grapes or sun-boiled eggs. When I was small, I was certain

that what was holy was mine—I caught moths in the garden, pressed their wings

between my thickest book, and waited for new moths to sprout up and out

of the pages. I ask God if He considers me a cracked seed of grace. He says,

Yes, dear. I understand. It would be exhausting to lead a life with careful consideration

for all things—stepping over anthills, saving lizards from pools. I mean, if I was God enough

to be idolized, every statue would be a golden depiction of me riding a goose-drawn chariot,

absentmindedly resting my shepherd’s scythe an inch away from their curved white

throats. Before God leaves, He clears the table, pats my head, and presses two messages into

my palms. In my left, You are the bridge. In my right, You are the dust.

Louise Glück - Snowdrops

Do you know what I was, how I lived? You know what despair is; then winter should have meaning for you.

I did not expect to survive, earth suppressing me. I didn't expect to waken again, to feel in damp earth my body able to respond again, remembering after so long how to open again in the cold light of earliest spring—

afraid, yes, but among you again crying yes risk joy

in the raw wind of the new world.

Raymond Carver - Late Fragment

And did you get what you wanted from this life, even so? I did. And what did you want? To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth.

Geoffrey Young - Parallel Bars

It gets bad and then it gets worse And then the bottom falls out But then it gets better, even great, you think You’re there, but then it goes sour, totally alone, hurting, But it comes back, new breath, friends again, It’s the best it’s been in months, Really clicking, it’s heaven, and then Just about the time you think it’s going to stay heaven, It gets bad, and then it gets worse, and then The bottom falls out, will it ever get better? and then It does, it’s even great, you blink an eye And it goes sour, vicious, destructive, But it comes back, new breath, friends again, It’s the best it’s been in months, really clicking, It’s heaven, and then just about the time You think it’s going to stay heaven

Paige Lewis - Because the Color Is Half the Taste

it’s a shame to eat blackberries in the dark, but that’s exactly what I’m up to when a man

startles down the street screaming, The fourth dimension is not time! He makes me feel stupid

and it’s hard to sleep knowing so little about everything, so I enroll in a night class

where I learn the universe is an arrow without end and it asks only one question:

How dare you? I recite it in bed, How dare you? How dare you? But still I can’t find sleep.

So I go out where winter is and roll around in the snow until a sharp rock

meets the vulnerable plush of my belly. A little blood. Hunched over, I must look

like I’m hiding something I don’t want to share. And I suppose that’s true—the sharp,

the warm wet. The color is half the pain. Why would anyone else want to see? How dare they?

Discord has introduced microtransactions to make only specific users hear sound effects. Skype is back as a livestreaming platform. X is now marketing “twitter” as a paid-only private area to post in on X. There are clouds gathering above the field now. There’s an ache in your tooth when you eat something sweet, sharp and stabbing, but you put it off. The wind makes the puddles in the mud ripple after it rains. When you look out, you like to pretend they are deeper, deep enough to drown in. You wonder if you’d still be able to see just how big the cloud-heavy sky is as you fall beneath the surface. You wonder if you’d hear the first drops of rain. You wonder how the wind always seems to find you out there. The field is large, and it is cold outside. Come inside now. It’s getting late.

David Whyte - Everything is Waiting for You

After Derek Mahon

Your great mistake is to act the drama as if you were alone. As if life were a progressive and cunning crime with no witness to the tiny hidden transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely, even you, at times, have felt the grand array; the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding out your solo voice. You must note the way the soap dish enables you, or the window latch grants you freedom. Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity. The stairs are your mentor of things to come, the doors have always been there to frighten you and invite you, and the tiny speaker in the phone is your dream-ladder to divinity.

Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the conversation. The kettle is singing even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots have left their arrogant aloofness and seen the good in you at last. All the birds and creatures of the world are unutterably themselves. Everything is waiting for you.

Alex Dimitrov - Once

Would you even believe when it finally happens

how easy it is to feel without any proof

that love may be, could be, actually is longer than time.

Robert Wood Lynn - Bringing a Gun to Chekhov’s House

It’s a party everyone’s real happy to see you and you’re not stupid you don’t show them the gun nobody is happy to see a gun and after all it’s his house and you know how he gets so you’re gonna leave it with the coats and there’s gonna be someone real cute there at the party someone you’ve got real good at looking away from it’ll be a real rager real scribble yourselves on the walls kind of night and there’s gonna be the part of it where you both end up in the bathroom line away from whoever you came with or will go home with and there will be this tremendous opportunity to say something even though it’s all very loud and you’ll think of the cleverest way to sum up the immense distance between people and make believe the being alive part of being alive and so the moment you open your mouth to say it you will know this is gonna work that you’re both gonna wreck everything about yourselves in the purest way you will be asking each other to whisper forgotten names and take turns napping with each other’s whole body weight on top of you and this is honestly the most gorgeous you have ever been absolutely finally and now the moment you open your mouth there is this tremendous noise coming from coming from coming from coming from oh the room with the coats at which point everything remembers quiet that angry kind of quiet and you’re not sure if you should still try and say it

Kyo Lee - Why I Have Decided to Live

Spoonfuls of moonlight. Cold air. Her knit blanket tugging at my body to stay. The fog resting on my shoulders, hugging me. Summer rain through an open window. Thunderstorms & how they change the world momentarily unafraid, or even better, unaware of humans. Because I left my country broken. Because I saw the first reflection of myself in a candlelight vigil. Because I was flickering. Because we made promises. Because I can keep trying & no one can stop me. Peaches. Stars. Willow trees. Acoustic music with a trembling voice. The kinds of poems that give me shivers. Trains to nowhere in particular. Our sweat sweet bodies colliding on wet grass. Her hands & the way they cradle my heart as if holding something precious. August night drives. Singing along to “Riptide” & eating cherries out of buckets. Because we promised to return. To mend a broken thing. How laughter colonizes the lungs. To think of myself as something larger than myself. Because I can love every small thing.

Aseem Kaul - Ghalib

Tonight, you recite Ghalib from memory; because poetry, like blood, must come from the heart.

Taking a sip from your glass after every couplet, the scotch rhyming perfectly the melancholy on your tongue.

You cling to nostalgia like an empty mirror, to the scent of this language that withers like flowers.

You gather pain the way the sky gathers, pinprick by slow pinprick, the stars.

Somewhere between question and answer the feeling dissolves. The need to sing becomes

the struggle not to fall. And you arrange your ruins into one last gesture,

knowing the Beloved will not heed your call, knowing she will prove false, like God, or the Moon.

***

You write to me from Delhi, speak of summer blackouts,

of how, disconnected from the machines, you thought of Ghalib –

the bomb blast of his grief leaving the city in ruins –

and how the history of loss could be written on a feather.

When the power returned you turned the lights off,

lit a candle to see the darkness a little better,

and still the shadows were not the same.

***

“Madness”, Ghalib writes, “is never without its reasons; surely there is something that the veil is meant to protect”

And I think of all the years we have spent listening to these ghazals, the verses

falling from our lips like pieces of exquisite glass from broken window frames;

shaping our mouths to his sadness, unbuttoning our collars to let his words stain

the rubbed language of our songs. What have we been hiding from,

my friend? What longing is this inside us that we disguise in a dead man’s clothes?

Richard Brautigan - We Stopped at Perfect Days

We stopped at perfect days and got out of the car. The wind glanced at her hair. It was as simple as that. I turned to say something—

Noah Mazer - Liberal Poem for Palestine

the guerrilla moves among the people as a fish swims through water i sit by the river i condemn the fish. i condemn the water.

Victoria Chang - The Sound of the Light

I can’t overhear light, can’t stroke it or scratch it, can’t turn it over. It’s a lot like grief, which has ringlets of light streaked through it.

Anna Kamieńska - Difference

Tell me what's the difference  between hope and waiting  because my heart doesn't know  It constantly cuts itself on the glass of waiting  It constantly gets lost in the fog of hope

Sandra Lim - Endings

The story has two endings. It has one ending and then another. Do you hear me? I do not have the heart to edit the other out.

Alex Dimitrov - Sunday

The streets before sunrise. The first memory. The daybreak. That place where runners make paths into spring and the park is eternally true. The glint of the buildings. The fog of our past lives. The first yes. The last no. The cabs flooding highways with people again. The clear sky. The Hudson. The gold light of Sunday. All this time I thought I knew. All this time I thought we would change.