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Asking, “When was the last time you cried?” is even more personal than asking someone’s salary or weight.
By Heather Kirn LanierJanuary 2013When she leaves you, you’ll bleed from your nose in your sleep. This cannot be stopped. The blood will go through the sheets. It will soak deep into the fibers of the mattress, and you will sleep on this forever.
By Jonathan StarkeNovember 2012Long after our last slow day together, / say, a campfire, a walk in the woods, / getting lost and not caring
By Jim RalstonSeptember 2012My sister’s husband died recently, and sorrow has made her a little girl again. Although she’s thirty-nine, I keep catching glimpses of her little-girl face, the one I know from old photographs and junior-high yearbooks.
By Alethea BlackSeptember 2012For some people life is effortless, like running as a child with no sense of the world turning beneath our feet. It is not that way for you. You will always be aware of the weight of your footsteps and the force of will required to move forward. Anger keeps you together, a mortar that begins to harden.
By Jennifer Mason-BlackAugust 2012— from “Wondrous” | I’m driving home from school when the radio talk / turns to E.B. White, his birthday, and I exit / the here and now of the freeway at rush hour
By Sarah FrelighAugust 2012We carry in our bodies a whole host of hurts, of lonely nights, of tiny slights and insults, of guilt for the slights and insults we’ve inflicted on others. If you’re single, you carry the added weight, the secret shame, of knowing that you are first in no one’s heart. You walk the earth with billions of other people, and you are first in no one’s heart.
By Heather KingAugust 2012We pull into the driveway of the house where I grew up, or where I gave it my best shot. It’s cold outside, but it’s the kind of cold you do not recognize until you are back inside. So much of life is understood by comparison.
By Linda McCullough MooreMay 2012This is what life does, as an act of great / though often misunderstood kindness — it brings us / over and over again to the same sorrows.
By Ruth L. SchwartzApril 2012March 2012We are, perhaps uniquely among the earth’s creatures, the worrying animal. We worry away our lives, fearing the future, discontent with the present, unable to take in the idea of dying, unable to sit still.
Lewis Thomas
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