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Toward the end he sat on the back porch, / sweeping his binoculars back and forth / over the dry scrub-brush and arroyos, / certain he saw Mexicans
By Tony HoaglandMay 2016You have faith you’re alive, no? You have faith you’re sitting here having a conversation with me. That I’m listening to you. Or maybe you don’t. Maybe you believe none of this is real. Maybe you believe in nothing but an endless void. But that’s still a kind of faith.
By Gabriel HellerMay 2016My mother regularly told me, Heather, if you are ever in danger and I’m not there, make your way to a house with flowers. The flowers show they care and are kind and will help.
It didn’t occur to me until years later that we had not a single bloom in our yard.
By Heather SellersApril 2016I had once believed in answers, saviors, miracles, and sages; divine justice and ideal love; the discovery of a lost Taoist parable or a missing biblical passage; a scientific intervention or progressive sociopolitical system that would liberate the oppressed; perhaps even news from NASA about habitable planets accepting applications for novelists. But I knew now that none of this would happen. The letter from a publisher, the spiritual breakthrough, the scientific solution, the literary prize, the big-hearted city, the understanding woman — they were all a mirage.
By Poe BallantineMarch 2016A chocolate sundae, a perfect joint, a freed man’s first meal
By Our ReadersFebruary 2016— from “For This” | It is for this / we have been torn / and mended / and torn again.
By Pat SchneiderJanuary 2016Though we aren’t blasé about death, we are accustomed to it. We know it will happen. When a person is hospitalized, it means his or her condition could turn serious, fast. A simple case of pneumonia could result in a whole-body infection that spirals and becomes fatal. A patient receiving a new hip could develop a blood clot that clogs his lungs. A heart-failure patient could suffer an arrhythmia. But hospital deaths are rarely as terrible as John’s.
By JoDean NicoletteJanuary 2016That which God said to the rose, and caused it to laugh in full-blown beauty, He said to my heart, and made it a hundred times more beautiful.April 2012Rumi
Because it’s embarrassing how many poems you’ve written / about killing yourself.
By Chris BurskOctober 2015It was snowing that morning as we left for church, the white sky spitting flakes, enough to dust the car but not enough to cover the dirty snow at the side of the road, the bare patches of dead lawn. It was January in Ames, Iowa, when snow no longer has its fluffy Christmas novelty and simply becomes another cold, hard fact of life.
By Kelly Grey CarlisleFebruary 2015Personal, political, provocative writing delivered to your doorstep every month—without a single ad.
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