The Conditional by Ada Limón
"Say we spend our last moments staring / at each other, hands knotted together"
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
Poem About Your Laugh by Susan Glickman
"When you laugh it is all the unsynchronized clocks / in the watchmaker's shop / striking their dissident hours"
What We Agreed to Call “Snow” in Yorùbá by I.S. Jones
"Snow is a landscape of loneliness. // It returns to Earth if only to be touched a little longer."
The Cats Will Know by Cesare Pavese
"You too will make gestures. / You’ll answer with words— / face of springtime, / you too will make gestures."
Once by Eavan Boland
"I do not want us to be immortal or unlucky. / To listen for our own death in the distance."
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
There Comes the Strangest Moment by Kate Light
"Your heart’s in retrograde. You simply have no choice. / Things people told you turn out to be true."
The Talk by Sharon Olds
"She took it and took it and broke, crying out / I hate being a person! diving / into the mother / as if / into / a deep pond
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