“just / pay attention, then patch / a few words together and don’t try / to make them elaborate” — Mary Oliver

“our country moving closer to its own truth and dread, / its own ways of making people disappear.” — Adrienne Rich

“But I want good tears when I stand on the street” — Jason Shinder

"Uncles lie / beautifully. Years later / Uncles won't much remember" — Kevin Young

"I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED / JUSTICE UNDER MY NOSE" — June Jordan

“Even with that brand new, raw despair / still erupting in our throats, never did we wish / to make children become ash.” — Erica Miriam Fabri

"The poets who are our enemies are not writing / for a canon, their letters black as smoke / filling an emptied square. They are writing for their lives." — Vievee Francis

“light keeps on breaking. / i keep knowing / the language of other nations.” — Lucille Clifton

"If joy is what tethers us to this life then most days, my mother & I float above the pavement, tied together by the fraying threads of her nightgown." — Hieu Minh Nguyen

“I will be standing at the edge of that fathomless crowd with an orange for you,” — Mary Ruefle

“You must be the grass / You must grow wildly over the graves” — Roger Reeves

“I pretend / I’m somebody, she / pretends she isn’t dead.” — Andrea Cohen

“But what the Man-Moth fears most he must do, although / he fails, of course, and falls back scared but quite unhurt.” — Elizabeth Bishop

“They find peace / in the way they contain the wind / and are gone.” — Lorna Dee Cervantes

“You’ll bring me / back home, won’t you?” — Gary Jackson

“the way you flinch / the way you guide someone's fingers to it / the way you stay still / the way that hand pulls back” — Ellen C. Bush

“There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.” — Louis MacNeice

“I am not entitled to what I have / therefore / everything I have is stolen / because I’m not entitled to it” — R. D. Laing

“Without which is my life.” — Solmaz Sharif

"My curious tale. I want to stand still but find myself moved patch by patch." — Vievee Francis

“He said I was fooling I am not a tree / and he dropped his leaves. / But his parents said look it is fall.” — Russell Edson

“On this land, is what makes life worth living: / on this land is the lady of the land, the mother / of beginnings and endings. She was named Palestine.” — Mahmoud Darwish

“Unremembered as old rain / Dries the sheer libation, / And the little petulant hand / Is an annotation.” — Edna St. Vincent Millay

“That night after eating, singing, and dancing / We lay together under the stars. / We know ourselves to be part of mystery.” — Joy Harjo

“There’s a dream I have in which I love the world. I run from end to end like fingers through her hair. There are no borders, only wind.” — Cameron Awkward-Rich

“God gave a Loaf to every Bird— / But just a Crumb— to Me— / I dare not / eat it—” — Emily Dickinson

“come celebrate / with me that everyday / something has tried to kill me / and has failed.” — Lucille Clifton

“my mother said I am going now / when you are alone you will be all right / whether or not you know you will know” — W.S. Merwin

"'O stand, stand at the window / As the tears scald and start; / You shall love your crooked neighbour / With your crooked heart.'" — W.H. Auden

"Have you lived / like a blow to the head" — Julio Cortazar

“may you / open your eyes to water / water waving forever / and may you in your innocence / sail through this to that” — Lucille Clifton

“Tell me how all this, and love too, / will ruin us.” — Richard Siken

“He stands up / to go sit by the window / realizes he has been sitting / by the window for hours.” — Garous Abdolmalekian

“I suffer, yes. Yes, I suffer. And I still / love nothing like I love myself.” — Faith Arkorful

“Know I told you / it was okay to go. Know I told you / it was okay to leave me. Why’d you believe me?” — Gabrielle Calvocaressi

“just a groom and a / walk, and a nest and an egg, and a roach called / cock.” — Robyn Schiff

“He said I was fooling I am not a tree / and he dropped his leaves. / But his parents said look it is fall.” — Russell Edson

“if he called again / I would put on my coat and galoshes” — Donald Hall

“There was no place in nature we could meet.” — Frank Bidart

“Don’t think / this poem wants to stay in that bedroom. / It wants to swaddle the impossible / contours of joy.” — K. Iver

“as all flesh / is proud of its wounds, wears them / as honors given out after battle, / small triumphs pinned to the chest—” — Jane Hirshfield

“Youngbloods ain't got no blood to waste / in no syringes, on no barroom floors, / in no strange lands / delaying other Youngbloods' freedom.” — Assata Shakur

“I needed to see her, to make sure / she was still there. I went the same way each evening / wanting to feel something, to see / this once-immortal creature get up.” — Joy Priest

“There was something deadly in it, / Or already dead. Something beyond the report / Of beauty.” — Brigit Pegeen Kelly

“I admire the grabbiness of lungs / I admire my thorough heart / I admire most that they are inseparable / what the lung grabs the heart uses” — Laura Lamb Brown-Lavoie

“Love remains a kind of present tense. This is how we describe the scenes in photographs—as though the actions in them were still happening.” — Carolina Ebeid

“It's all my fault: words about nothing / get me nothing.” — Auvaiyar

“and into the clouds or the hills, / or the rumpled sea, / and is gone–” — Mary Oliver

“alone no loneliness done. in the dream / in the quiet of the day done in the sunrise / Louise. in the dream in the dream / in the sunrise in the sunset.” — Linda Gregg

“He is carrying / a heavy load.” — Jane Mead

“How summer’s children turn / into fish and rain softens men” — C. D. Wright

"As you liberate yourself in metaphor, think of others / (those who have lost the right to speak)." — Mahmoud Darwish

“drive, he sd, for / christ’s sake, look / out where yr going.” — Robert Creeley

“Wouldn’t it be nice / if that were true? / I’d tear a map / and be right next to you.” — Naomi Shihab Nye

“i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done / by only me is your doing,my darling)” — e.e. cummings

"somebody need a map / to understand you. / somebody need directions / to move around you." — Lucille Clifton

“I am feeling too good / to report to work today, / if I feel sick tomorrow / I will come in early” — Pedro Pietri

“I am trying, I think, to forgive myself / for something I don't know what.” — Ross Gay

“I know how it feels, born as I’ve been / into these rotting times, as into sin. Everybody’s / busy, so distraught they forget to kill me, / and even that won’t keep me alive.” — Nathalie Shapero

“Where do I want her to hurry to? To her grave? / To mine? Where one day she might stand all grown?” — Marie Howe

"If you can’t be free, be a mystery." — Rita Dove

“you will wipe the dirt, the decomposing / leaves, the insects / from my re-forming body / you will hold my almost-formed left hand / and beg me to return,” — Paula Harris

“In the hush your heart sounds / like a black cricket.” — Charles Simic

“Abstracted as water glints, / The fields lion-colored and rope-colored, / As in a picture of Paradise,” — Charles Wright

“Why would what died once keep on dying off / Over & over like a seam in an old velvet coat?” — Lucie Brock-Broido

“What am I missing? I ask / patting my chest / pocket. // and I am missing everything living / that won’t come with me / into this sunny afternoon” — Max Ritvo

“one who has been inclined to fall / and one who raises himself” — Tadeusz Różewicz

“There’s a dream I have in which I love the world.” — Cameron Awkward-Rich

“by the way thank You for / keeping Your face hidden, I / can hardly bear the beauty of this world.” — Franz Wright

“It’s terrorism when you’re forbidden to speak yr language / paddled for it, made to run a hundred laps in the snow / in your thin & holey sneakers.” — Diane di Prima

“maybe there is soul under everything, / even when we strike rock first.” — Irène Mathieu

“She only / buries their bodies, their wings. / She packs the dirt tight around / their noodle necks & they shake / like long eyelashes in a hurricane.” — Ben Doller

“thou unravished unbride / unthou

“The grief remains but is changed by / what it is covered with. A picture of / oblivion is not the same as oblivion.” — Victoria Chang

“Ah! ás the heart grows older / It will come to such sights colder / By and by, nor spare a sigh” — Gerard Manley Hopkins

“sing songs to crop duster” — Robert Grenier

“Through her gauze window she could not help but hear / The bird, which sounded like someone talking. / She stopped in her shuttle, thinking of her absent lover;” — Li Po

“And soon enough / You will feel lightly / For the warmth over your heart” — Mark Kirschen

"In light, we all were ailing from separation and homesickness. In light, we had to find a way to settle down, as my mother said. In light, we lived like birds." — Don Mee Choi

“I told him I needed time— / he gave me a cuckoo clock // (I couldn’t work the winding key)” — Caitlin Doyle

"The grieving have only the unknown. / It’s their only staple and inheritance. / Pain has no logic. All things redeem / the grieving except your rational questions." — Maya Abu Al-Hayyat

"The best part is after midnight / when the crowd at its thickest raises / a humid flag and hotcombed hair reverts / to nappy origins. I go to Redbones / to put an end to denial." — Thylias Moss

“Remember not my name / But the names of my kids / who you killed while / they were carrying my death” — Mohammed Moussa

“Indeed I have observed and myself have partaken / of blue and pink raisins. But my joy was different: / My joy was to see the blue and the pink counterpointing.” — José García Villa

“Time was. A cry? / A cry all right. / He hawks and spits, / fevered as by groinfire.” — Robert Hayden

“Everywhere / I looked something was coming alive in dramatic fashion” — Allison Titus

“The nights were fathomless; the wind, the low hills / Dwindling. The unforgiving light was your own.” — Ian William Douglas

“But the darkness pulls in everything: / shapes and fires, animals and myself, / how easily it gathers them! — ” — Rainer Maria Rilke