Mary-Kim Arnold – Self-Portrait as Semiramis

“Had I been raised by doves wouldn’t I have learned to fly”

Denise Levertov – Love Song

“A song that can be sung over and over,
long notes or long bones.”

Carl Phillips – Domestic

“waking to your hands around me, and remembering these are the fingers, the hands I’ve over and over given myself to”

W.H. Auden – Lullaby

“Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm”

John Keats – Ode on Melancholy

“Ay, in the very temple of Delight Veil’d Melancholy has her sovran shrine”

Frank Bidart – The Old Man at the Wheel

“By exorcism you survived. By submission, then making”

Jean Follain – Simple Expectation

“gardens are becoming undone”

Jayanta Mahapatra – After the Death of a Friend

“A slow-moving ray of sunlight walks me backward to a past turned magical by the virtue of its emptiness, this part of myself that never fails to embrace us”

June Jordan – On Time Tanka

“I hear you and I accuse you both: I refuse to choose: All black and blue news means that I hurt and I lose.”

Iman Mersal – A Celebration

“The thread of the story fell to the ground, so I went down on my hands and knees to hunt for it”

Langston Hughes – The Negro Speaks of Rivers

“My soul has grown deep like the rivers”

Marie Howe – Practicing

“I want to write a song for that thick silence in the dark, and the first pure thrill of unreluctant desire, just before we’d made ourselves stop.”