Mountain, Stone by Lena Khalaf Tuffaha
“Do not name your children. Let them live / nameless, seal their eyelids / and sell their voices to the nightingale.” — Lena Khalaf Tuffaha
My Crow by Raymond Carver
“It sat there on the branch for a few minutes. / Then picked up and flew beautifully / out of my life.” — Raymond Carver
Black Lead in a Nancy Meyers Film by Rio Cortez
"Aging, at all. I want that. And to fall / perhaps most honestly in love / beside the ocean" — Rio Cortez
If Life Is As Short As Our Ancestors Insist It Is, Why Isn’t Everything I Want Already At My Feet by Hanif Abdurraqib
"I am a simple man. I want, mostly, / a year that will not kill me when it is over."
Once by Eavan Boland
"I do not want us to be immortal or unlucky. / To listen for our own death in the distance."
You Can’t Have It All by Barbara Ras
"You can’t bring back the dead, / but you can have the words forgive and forget hold hands / as if they meant to spend a lifetime together."
Wild Oats by W. S. Merwin
"I needed my mistakes / in their own order / to get me here" — W. S. Merwin
The Highway by W. S. Merwin
"The sun and everything / Are stuck in the same places, and the ditch / Is the same all the time, full of every kind / Of bone" — W. S. Merwin
from East Coker by T.S. Eliot
"Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt / Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure"