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Silver Threads

Greg Alan Brownderville & Zach Savich

‘Time trapped me in this canyon, this dark jar — / jabbed holes in the sky to spare me light and air.’

Linked

Ruth Ozeki

‘old poems, like polished stones, / tumbled words to break my teeth on.’

The Japanese Firefly Squid

Kimiko Hahn

‘nothing like an ancient corridor where a / woman is stripped of resistance.’

Two Poems

Kimiko Hahn

‘Certainly the tide or the dog striding along the sluff of seaweed, / this afternoon – brown, light green, black green, white and red.’

Demeter

Fiona Benson

‘I head down the path hoping she’ll come / but when I look back she’s gone and my own voice / snags at her name like barbed wire on skin.’

Picnic

Emily Berry

‘Watching the sea is like watching something in pieces continually striving to be whole / Imagine trying to pick up a piece of the sea and show it to a person / I tried to do that.’

Pyjamas

Rodney Koeneke

‘Lover, does it matter / how the river spends its glitter’

The More We Think About It

Michael Earl Craig

‘Yeah, something has slapped us. / We have definitely seen something.’

The Common Cold

Laura Kasischke

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

Cooley High: 1991

Aracelis Girmay

‘Please stay with me as I / replay the last touch.’

Toboggan Run

Fiona Benson

‘What would I give / to be one of those swimmers in all this snow, / swallowed by the cold and the night’s strange radiance?’

The first resurrection

Laura Kasischke

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

The Mountain

Christopher DeWeese

‘When the oxygen thins, / the world gets less reciprocal.’

Observations on the Ground

Mary Ruefle

‘Those flowers belong to the dead.’