For My Friends, in Reply to a Question by Safia Elhillo
“in my dreams / I am touching the faces of my friends, we are / each one of us touching” — Safia Elhillo
[Goldenrod, I could say, you know, everybody wants something] by Diane Seuss
"Goldenrod, is your dying hard? I know, / I know dying's hard. Are you reaching toward, you know, or just reaching?"
Slow Dance by the Ocean by Linda Gregg
"The world moves, my Lord, and I stay still, / yielding as it passes through."
apology by George Abraham
"forgive the bodies i swallowed like broken teeth: the knees i spent trying to summon god in my own mouth:"
September a week in by Hala Alyan
"I’m trying to be enough / for this body: one heartbeat, flung like a shovel into the day."
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
When Your Life Looks Back by Jane Hirshfield
"Whatever direction you turned toward was face to face. / No back of the world existed, / No unseen corner, no test. No other earth to prepare for."
Any Common Desolation by Ellen Bass
"You may have to break / your heart, but it isn’t nothing / to know even one moment alive."
I Remember the Carrots by Ada Limón
"I loved them: my own bright dead things. / I’m thirty-five and remember all that I’ve done wrong."