Strawberry by Paisley Rekdal
"I’m going to fail simply by standing in front of you, / waving my arms in your face as if hailing a taxi: / I’m here, I’m here
You Think You Are Something Less Real Than You Are by Wendy Xu
"There is nothing / you won’t put on. You put on the darkness. / You put on some stars and even what / is between them. You put on the moon."
Poem Full of Worry Ending with My Birth by Tarfia Faizullah
"I worry I can no longer pretend / enough to get through another / year of pretending
Naming the Heartbeats by Aimee Nezhukumatathil
"When you / get a group of heartbeats together you get names that call out / into the evening’s first radiance of planets"
Turing Test by Franny Choi
"in order to contemplate lineage / you start with what you know / hands, hair, bones, sweat"
From Blossoms by Li-Young Lee
"O, to take what we love inside, / to carry within us an orchard, to eat / not only the skin, but the shade, / not only the sugar, but the days
Conversation by Ai
"and you realize how that image / is simply the extension of another image, / that your own life / is a chain of words / that one day will snap"
Notebook Fragments by Ocean Vuong
"Woke up screaming with no sound. The room filling with a bluish water / called dawn."