Browse Topics
Romantic Love
This Little Bit I Am Trying To Hold
Poems About Departures
Listen to the poets in this month’s special poetry section read their poems about leaving and letting go. To listen, click the play button below each title in the article.
I will leave you, / and I will / leave the sudden // darkness of afternoon thunderstorms / and I will leave / the rain and its patience in shaping mountains
— from “I Will Leave,” by Michael Bazzett
I am here to translate my father’s death / into fruit. Something that can be held. To bring / it up to your lips the way I spooned strawberry / yogurt up to his and said to him the word “Eat.” / There was no use, in the end. There was no hunger.
— from “I Did What I Could to Keep This,” by Peter Markus
Tonight, because all matter is dissolving, you & I / are being gradually undressed by the universe — // silk & wool molecules mingling with cells / rising from skin like souls
— from “Everything,” by Terry Lucas
November 2023Poetry By Sparrow And Alison Luterman
When I worked as a manuscript reader for The Sun, I didn’t always agree with founder and editor Sy Safransky about poetry. . . . But there were two poets whose work always appealed to both of us: the Bay Area poet and essayist Alison Luterman and New York City’s kindest oddball, Sparrow. . . . It’s my honor to introduce both poets, whose rewarding, divergent work has been crucial in shaping the voice and image of The Sun for decades.
— Ann Humphreys
June 2023Some Quiet Evenings
I go out to sit with them — thin / insects tuning their strings, / the night’s first bat casting / in the breeze — and remember / that evening, hot and windless, / a new lover stripping / my bed, spreading my sheets / on the moonless grass.
June 2023
This Month In Sun History
Our 50th Year Of Publication
Although The Sun had already released three books of material from its pages, The Mysterious Life of the Heart, released in February 2009, was the first to be centered on a theme: romantic love.
January 2023
Bat Season
These were strange and intoxicating expeditions. At the cliff-lined ends of forest-service roads or the edges of muddy cattle tanks, or in the cricket-loud groves where saguaros gave way to oaks, I would help stretch nets on moonless evenings. Bats fluttered into the thin weave and were trapped, toothy and screaming.
August 2022
Blue Ladder
My uncle finally kicked me out, and I was living in the twenty-four-hour Kroger on Fairhaven Avenue in Tustin, California, pilfering food and sleeping at the coffee bar. One day Mr. Muniz pushed a cart through the frozen-foods section where I was fanning myself, and he stopped. I’d gotten ugly, my face wasn’t right, and I could tell he was thinking, What the hell?
August 2022
Love In Our Seventies
We don’t take each other for granted, because we know we’re old. Sometimes when we’re bird-watching — field guides, binoculars — happy to be looking at egrets or green-winged teal, I think, One of us is going to die first.
June 2022Without Ceasing
You never grew tired of watching her work. You loved the hum of the machine, the sawdust that stuck to her sleeve, and how she bent her head over the wood like something swan. You knew she was sharing something intimate with you. You were witnessing prayer.
May 2022
