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"
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."
The Attic and Its Nails by Naomi Shihab Nye
"It’s hard up there. You dig in a box for whatever the moment requires: sweater, wreath, the other half of the walky-talky, and find twelve things you forgot about
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
"September when the wind / drops and to us it seems / that the days are waiting / I needed my mistakes / in their own order / to get me here"
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"
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"
i am running into a new year by Lucille Clifton
"it will be hard to let go / of what i said to myself / about myself / when i was sixteen and / twenty-six and thirty-six / even thirty-six"
The Meaning of Birds by Charlie Smith
"it is not news that we live in a world / where beauty is unexplainable / and suddenly ruined / and has its own routines"