“The Debate” by Alison Luterman I’m listening to my father and his brother, both in their eighties, debate their childhood from adjoining La-Z-Boy recliners. “We had no toys,” my father insists. “What are you talking about, no toys?” My uncle practically leaps from his chair, except he can’t, on account of his back and his legs and his feet and his hips. “We had tons of toys!” Then he lists them: the playing cards (“Those don’t count,” my father says); the train set (“Oh, yeah, I forgot about the train set”); the sleds — “Did anyone else on our block have sleds?” Uncle Barry asks. “Nineteen-forty, people are crawling out of the Great Depression on hands and knees, tell me: Did anyone on our block besides us have a sled?” My father’s father had a good job delivering newspapers and brought home sixty-five dollars a week, enough for Chinese food every Friday and cupcakes on birthdays. “We really didn’t have birthday parties,” my father contends, and my uncle lunges at this. “What are you talking about? What about that surprise party when you turned thirteen?” “That was the only time,” my father counters. Don’t even try, Uncle Barry, I almost say, then catch myself. I want this unwinnable argument to continue — forever, if possible. I want the Brooklyn music of their voices entwined in a duet with no resolution. I want the song — half lament, half celebration — to go on and on and on.

Small Kindnesses by Danusha Laméris I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you” when someone sneezes, a leftover from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying. And sometimes, when you spill lemons from your grocery bag, someone else will help you pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other. We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot, and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder, and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass. We have so little of each other, now. So far from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange. What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here, have my seat,” “Go ahead — you first,” “I like your hat.”

In a Grain of Sand By Jesús Papoleto Meléndez To see a world in a grain of sand … —from “Auguries of Innocence” by William Blake We are Starseeds every one of us – you & me, & me and you & him & her, & them & they & those Who know of this are truly blessed … True for all living beings, beings living – not humans only, but ants & trees & the open breeze, things that breathe air or fire, water, earth all kinds of dust & dirt, particles a part of all, all a part of Everything that is in everything; Thus, it Sings!!! & its song is Life, & Life is!!! … a seed of Stars, the dust of Suns & Moons rocks & dust & outer smoke in outer space Floating in a bath of timelessness, counted, measured numbered by some species – others caring not; Science & Mathematics trying to plot Poetry in motion, Motion in a Helix’s curve, And Life on Earth becomes visible to You through the naked I!

Driving Upstate with My Father C.L. O’Dell at the end of a bad year. Trees begin to outnumber houses. Rain turns to snow as fields hang like paintings. Dad fills his lip with chew, talks. The truck is warm and rattles with tools. Every so often we enter a silence as he ends a story and readies the next, about work, or money, or deer. If I’m lucky he’ll share the good stuff and tell me how he almost lost everything, or the time, while teaching my uncle how to swing an axe, he split his shin like celery, filling his boot with blood. The best is when he forgets he’s a man and tells me what he loves. I carried a doe through the dark, he says, and then describes the stars.

That Part in the Music Carl Phillips Once loyal to a cruel master, the dog moves like a man who not so long ago weighed a lot less and is still figuring the difference, what if anything to make of it. It doesn’t matter, whatever tenderness she’s known since; the dog, I mean. They’re called hesitation wounds, the marks left where the hand, having meant to do harm, started to, then reconsidered. As if a hand could reconsider. The dog wants to trust, you can see it in her eyes, like that part in the music where it still sounds like snow used to. There were orchards, still; meadows. She’ll never be free.

Why I Respect the Dog By Catherine Pierce The dog weighs twelve pounds and uses them as she pleases. The king-size bed is not big enough. Sleep enabler, stretch-monger, when she wants to be touched, she offers up the narrow white arc of her belly. When a loud face crowds her, she growls. Or, depending on the weather, the time, the face, she doesn’t. The dog knows the precise creak of the cheese drawer and waits. She is never wrong. The dog does not care for rain. The dog does not fret about the carpets. The dog is on the table again, and the sandwich crusts are gone, the cereal milk is gone, the cracker crumbs are gone. She knows “down” but will not heed it. Sometimes at night I leave her sleeping on the couch, her eyes flickering with dreams. From bed I hear her nails clicking down the hall, fast, faster. She noses open the door and launches herself against me, her twelve pounds, her punk-black fur. She wants to be close, right now, it is urgent, and then, simple as that, she is.

The Orange By Wendy Cope At lunchtime I bought a huge orange— The size of it made us all laugh. I peeled it and shared it with Robert and Dave— They got quarters and I had a half. And that orange, it made me so happy, As ordinary things often do Just lately. The shopping. A walk in the park. This is peace and contentment. It’s new. The rest of the day was quite easy. I did all the jobs on my list And enjoyed them and had some time over. I love you. I’m glad I exist.

Message To a Former Friend By Tony Hoagland I just wanted to write and say, in case you are hit tomorrow by a truck or are swept from the beach by a freak wave; or in case your ex-wife decides to take her own life right after taking yours; or in case you go to the doctor, who finds a lump in your neck, and you are carried swiftly out onto the terrible waters of clinics and infusions and I never see you again — I just wanted to say, Bon voyage, my friend, my dear and former friend. I just wanted to confess how much you meant to me back then, before I learned to hold my love in check thanks to my tutorial with you. Thank God I got those holes sealed shut through which every passerby could see my neediness, and thank God I banished you into that frozen part of me where nothing moves or breathes. And yet it’s funny, isn’t it? Our weakness can never be eliminated; neediness is part of what we are. Living is a kind of wound; a wound is a kind of opening; and even love that disappeared mysteriously comes back like water bubbling up from underground, cleansed from its long journey in the dark. Right in the open, there it is, waiting for someone to arrive and kneel and drink from it.

Mother Talks Back to the Monster By Carrie Shipers Tonight, I dressed my son in astronaut pajamas, kissed his forehead and tucked him in. I turned on his night-light and looked for you in the closet and under the bed. I told him you were nowhere to be found, but I could smell your breath, your musty fur. I remember all your tricks: the jagged shadows on the wall, click of your claws, the hand that hovered just above my ankles if I left them exposed. Since I became a parent I see danger everywhere— unleashed dogs, sudden fevers, cereal two days out of date. And even worse than feeling so much fear is keeping it inside, trying not to let my love become so tangled with anxiety my son thinks they're the same. When he says he's seen your tail or heard your heavy step, I insist that you aren't real. Soon he'll feel too old to tell me his bad dreams. If you get lonely after he's asleep, you can always come downstairs. I'll be sitting at the kitchen table with the dishes I should wash, crumbs I should wipe up. We can drink hot tea and talk about the future, how hard it is to be outgrown.

“What I Didn’t Know Before” By Ada Limón was how horses simply give birth to other horses. Not a baby by any means, not a creature of liminal spaces, but a four-legged beast hellbent on walking, scrambling after the mother. A horse gives way to another horse and then suddenly there are two horses, just like that. That’s how I loved you. You, off the long train from Red Bank carrying a coffee as big as your arm, a bag with two computers swinging in it unwieldily at your side. I remember we broke into laughter when we saw each other. What was between us wasn’t a fragile thing to be coddled, cooed over. It came out fully formed, ready to run.

“Young Poets” By Nicanor Parra, translated by Miller Williams Write as you will in whatever style you like too much blood has run under the bridge to go on believing that only one road is right. In poetry everything is permitted with only this condition of course you have to improve the blank page.

the name before the name before mine By Jay Besemer the unknown has hold of me and its grip is strong as honey on the underside of a spoon the unknown i mean is not the usual one the future the tomorrow of survival but the past and what happened in the name of the name after mine and in the name of the name before mine i do not know enough to speak i do not know enough to remain silent there is a fear that holds me and it sounds like wind it sounds like katydids in catalpa ah the tall grass of the days before i knew there was a before me where do i live if there’s no home remaining where do i live if the home i helped build can never be mine and the one i was born into never was

Letter to the Person Who Carved His Initials into the Oldest Living Longleaf Pine in North America by Matthew Olzmann Tell me what it’s like to live without curiosity, without awe. To sail on clear water, rolling your eyes at the kelp reefs swaying beneath you, ignoring the flicker of mermaid scales in the mist, looking at the world and feeling only boredom. To stand on the precipice of some wild valley, the eagles circling, a herd of caribou booming below, and to yawn with indifference. To discover something primordial and holy. To have the smell of the earth welcome you to everywhere. To take it all in, and then, to reach for your knife.

Good Dog By Steven Duong is what I say to my fish when I pet her. A dog is anything small & good to me. She nips my finger, breaks no skin but the water’s. Today I took my pills & felt little. Now I feel lots. I love this thing of mine. Her fins are good & her tail is too. Good dog.

Special Problems in Vocabulary By Tony Hoagland There is no single particular noun for the way a friendship, stretched over time, grows thin, then one day snaps with a popping sound. No verb for accidentally breaking a thing while trying to get it open —a marriage, for example. No particular phrase for losing a book in the middle of reading it, and therefore never learning the end. There is no expression, in English, at least, for avoiding the sight of your own body in the mirror, for disliking the touch of the afternoon sun, for walking into the flatlands and dust that stretch out before you after your adventures are done. No adjective for gradually speaking less and less, because you have stopped being able to say the one thing that would break your life loose from its grip. Certainly no name that one can imagine for the aspen tree outside the kitchen window, in spade-shaped leaves spinning on their stems, working themselves into a pale-green, vegetable blur. No word for waking up one morning and looking around, because the mysterious spirit that drives all things seems to have returned, and is on your side again.

The Bats By Mark Wunderlich I share my house with a colony of bats. They live in the roof peak, enter through a gap. At dusk they fly out, dip into inverted arcs to catch what flutters or stings, what can only be hunted at night. Sunlight stops their flight, drives them into their hot chamber to rest and nest, troll-faces pinched shut. I hear them scratch. In darkness they chop and hazard through the sky, around blue outlines of pines, pitch up over the old Dutch house we share. They scare some but not me. I see them for what they seem— timid, wee, happy or lucky, pinned to the roof beams, stitched up in their ammonia reek and private as dreams.

Whisk By Anna Scotti I told my grandmother I am afraid and she made that little wave, each plump finger brushing away my worries just the way she’d brush crumbs from around the toaster tray, the way she’d sweep the dog’s dry tracks from the trailer floor. Oh, now, it’s not so bad here, she said, but I am afraid that when I’m gone no one will remember her, her dimpled knuckles, the way her mouth turned down at the corners in a sweet prim frown. No one will put flowers on her grave; even I don’t do that now, but what I mean is, no one will intend to. I told my mother I am afraid she’ll die alone and she laughed out loud: Let’s hope that’s the worst thing coming. I looked down at my own hands, knotted in the dog’s fur, and saw that they are like my father’s, blue-veined and broad, and I stroked my hair, my cheek, with the hand that is most like his, until the dog struggled to get down, until the kettle whistled; then I sat alone at the kitchen table and stirred a cup of tea.

Boy By Annelyse Gelman He found himself kneeling in mud And asked the river for forgiveness. The river punished him with silence. His whole life it had consumed him, The fear of doing it wrong, and now— He walked among the trees Like a gallery, uncertain where to start. Afraid of looking at them wrong or in The wrong order. His whole life Even the streamlets, the streamlets had Shied from him like mice. He _____ To be _____. In the clearing the dew Evaporates. The grass looks dull, dutiful. One by one, the components of feeling Slide around his body without touching his Body. His body is a snow globe. His thoughts Snow. In him on him falls the snow. He is Buried, utterly, like the sea is buried by rain.

The birthday of the world By Margie Piercy On the birthday of the world I begin to contemplate what I have done and left undone, but this year not so much rebuilding of my perennially damaged psyche, shoring up eroding friendships, digging out stumps of old resentments that refuse to rot on their own. No, this year I want to call myself to task for what I have done and not done for peace. How much have I dared in opposition? How much have I put on the line for freedom? For mine and others? As these freedoms are pared, sliced and diced, where

Letter By Tadeusz Dąbrowski Yesterday I sent you a letter. And today on the phone you tell me you are pregnant. I pack up and return, you greet me at the airport, you’re even lovelier than in my letter that’s on its way to you. We build a house, our child grows, our parents shrink, then a few years of sweat and tears, in which we prudently pickle cabbage and gherkins for the ever-colder days. In the coloring book of our life there are fewer and fewer blank spaces, the crayons grow shorter, we try to be precise, but even so we go over the lines. We busy ourselves with everyday matters, and our paths are ever deeper, they start to look like tunnels. Meanwhile my letter’s on its way to you. You’ll open it when it suits you best.