Roxane Beth Johnson – Blues for Almost Forgotten Music

“This is the way of all amplitude: we need the brightness to die some. This is the way of love and music: it plays like a god and then is done.”

Mahmoud Darwish – And We Love Life

“And we love life if we find a way to it.”

Rowan Ricardo Phillips – Over the Counties of Kings and Queens Came the Second Idea

“Storyless and beheld, by the amber god Who makes it so and the living god who undoes it?”

Langston Hughes – Youth

“Yesterday, a night-gone thing a sun-down name”

L. Ash Williams – Red Wine Spills

“I think of evolution, what it means to make it through this world with your skin intact, how flesh is fragile but makes a needle and thread of itself when necessary”

Haki R. Madhubuti – Gwendolyn Brooks: America in the Wintertime

“you thought, wrote, and lived poetry, knew that terror is also language based on denial, first-ism, and rich cowards.”

Galway Kinnell – little sleep-head’s sprouting hair in the moonlight

“Kiss the mouth that tells you, here, here is the world. This mouth. This laughter. These temple bones. The still undanced cadence of vanishing.”

Marge Piercy – Right to Life

“This is my body. If I give it to you I want it back. My life is a non-negotiable demand”

James Kavanaugh – My Easy God is Gone

“Now he haunts me seldom: some fierce umbilical is broken, I live with my own fragile hopes and sudden rising despair.”

Seamus Heaney – A Call

“And found myself then thinking: if it were nowadays, This is how Death would summon Everyman. Next thing he spoke and I nearly said I loved him.”

Frank O’Hara – Meditations in an Emergency

“Why should I share you? Why don’t you get rid of someone else for a change? I am the least difficult of men. All I want is boundless love. Even trees understand me! Good heavens, I lie under them, too, don’t I? I’m just like a pile of leaves.”

Nazim Hikmet – Things I Didn’t Know I Loved

“I didn’t know I loved so many things and I had to wait until sixty to find it out sitting by the window on the Prague-Berlin train watching the world disappear as if on a journey of no return”