Forrest Gander – Beckoned

“At which point my grief-sounds ricocheted outside of language. Something like a drifting swarm of bees.”

Mary Cornelia Hartshorne – Fallen Leaves

“There will come whispering movement, and green things unnumbered Will pierce through the mould with their yellow-green, sun-searching fingers”

W.H. Auden – Taller To-day

“But happy now, though no nearer each other”

Jim Gauer – Will This Thought Do?

“No I don’t think I’ll work today. Today it sounds best To let the silence work its ends out. Today Of what my words were, sounds Forming the heart of things, there remains Only the heart of things, and this heart Rings true.”

Brandi Nicole Martin – A Day that Was Mine

“Look at my heartbeat and its consequence, that cup warm on my palm, the street so close to the ocean, every brick got drenched”

Richard Wilbur – An Event

“What is an individual thing? They roll like a drunken fingerprint across the sky!”

John Koethe – Late, Late Show

“I never even thought of reading them, yet now I like the way They sometimes sound the way I like to think life feels, full of Nuances and nothing, in which nothing’s ever heightened Or exaggerated, and something unspoken and unrealized remains.”

William Cullen Bryant – Summer Wind

“and I woo the wind That still delays his coming. Why so slow, Gentle and voluble spirit of the air? Oh, come and breathe upon the fainting earth Coolness and life!”

Joshua Jennifer Espinoza – The Sunset and the Purple-Flowered Tree

“talk to a screen who assures me everything is fine. I am not broken. I am not depressed. I am simply in touch with the material conditions of my life. It is the end of the world, and it’s fine.”

Ellen Bass – Fracture

“Her massive head raised, desperate to catch their scent. Each footfall a fracture in the earth’s crust.”

Adrienne Rich – Thirty-Three

“I used myself, let nothing use me. Like being on a private dole, sometimes more like cutting bricks in Egypt. What life was there, was mine, now and again to lay one hand on a warm brick and touch the sun’s ghost with economical joy.”

Yannis Ritsos – Achilles After Dying

“no duties or tight armor, most of all without the humble hypocrisy of heroism, hour after hour he can taste the saltiness of evening, the stars, the silence, and that feeling— mild and endless—of general futility, his only companions the wild goats.”