If you stand there long enough the air will thicken with dusk and dust and exhaust and finally with a starless dark. The day will become something it’s never been before, something for which I have no name. — Philip Levine, from “How to Get There,” Poetry (February 2012)
Calm down, my Sorrow, we must move with care. / You called for evening; it descends, it’s here. — Charles Baudelaire, “Meditation,” trans, Robert Lowell, Poetry (September 1961)
A poem in a difficult time is beautiful flowers in a cemetery. — Mahmoud Darwish, from “To A Young Poet,” Poetry (March 2010)
Night falls and the empty intimacy of the whole world fills my heart to frothing. The past has trudged to this one spot and falls into the stream, its flashlight in its mouth. Ancient tears beneath the surface rise and scatter like carp, while an ivory hairpin floats away like a loose tooth going back… Continue reading Mary Ruefle
The past is a terrifying place. Why would anyone choose to live there? Don’t forget me, they say, the ghosts expulsed by dawn have ceased to phosphoresce. It is not crucial that I write but that I record a few of these atypical migrations of the human soul. Yes, there is one I recognize only… Continue reading D. A. Powell
Just ahead of dawn, the wall was like a silken drape near a silver light: keeping nothing out, keeping nothing in. — Cindy St. Onge, from “Resurrection (An Aubade),” Dappled Things (10.3, SS. Peter and Paul, 2015.)
A child came up to me in the park and asked for a cigarette. Her eyes were startled cats, her voice, a chandelier. I don’t smoke, I said. She took a seat beside me on the bench, resting her head against my shoulder. Her hair smelled like an old dictionary cracked open after rain. I… Continue reading Rachel McKibbens
