Slow Dance by the Ocean by Linda Gregg
"The world moves, my Lord, and I stay still, / yielding as it passes through."
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."
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"
Being in This World Makes Me Feel Like a Time Traveler by Kaveh Akbar
"One day I stopped in a lobby for cocktails and hors d’oeuvres / and ever since, the life of this world has seemed still."
“Why Is This Age Worse…?” by Anna Akhmatova
"In a stupor of grief and dread / have we not fingered the foulest wounds / and left them unhealed by our hands?"
The Leash by Ada Limón
"But sometimes, I swear I hear it, the wound closing / like a rusted-over garage door, and I can still move / my living limbs into the world without too much / pain
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"
Encounter by Czeslaw Milosz
"O my love, where are they, where are they going / The flash of a hand, streak of movement, rustle of pebbles."