Sharon Olds

‘When I build a fire, I feel purposeful.’

Issue 131

Kathryn Maris

‘this dream that might have been pleasant for an / 8-year-old could instead emerge as a nightmare for a woman / on the brink of menopause’

Issue 100

Jamie McKendrick

‘greener / for an alien crop of hogweed higher / than us’

Issue 2

David Katz

‘Ever notice the change that comes over / your gentle wife the minute she sets / foot in a grocery store?’

Issue 119

Jamie McKendrick

David Masello

‘On the drive down the Taconic, / you sleep, your head sinks then snaps / up when it reaches some reflex angle.’

Ange Mlinko

‘I rediscovered the efficacy of meter (or the ‘contrast between fixity and flux’) when I was stuck in a shark tunnel with my kids and was afraid I was coming down with a panic attack.’

Vénus Khoury-Ghata

‘The wells are kept for the use of the dead who splash the / walls with their silence.’

Issue 130

Karthika Naïr

‘Shyama, Sister, why / the need for dazed allegiance / to men?’

Richard Meier

‘I’d gone there with my girlfriend of three years, / then left her three days after meeting you.’

Derek Mahon

‘a voice, not quite a voice, in the sea distance / listening to its own thin cetaceous whistle’

Laura Kasischke

‘The moth locked up all / winter in the strongbox.’

Megan Levad

‘Out of the Zeitgeist / and onto the party barge.’

Issue 126

Laura Kasischke

‘But here we are again, you and I, the / two of us, tangled / up and biological.’