##Goatsong by Leila Chatti I will survive the wrong I've done. All the love that didn't serve me. My youth used up worshiping mercurial myopics. I've cried a lot very briefly. This sorrow has helped make my career. Yes, I'm a difficult person to endure, I hardly manage. Oh hum, the rest of my life keeps coming. It feels just like I knew it would. ##Sad by Jeremy Radin It is sad to tip the kettle over the cup & discover there is no more tea in the kettle. It is sad when the diner is closed. It is sad when the hawk seizes the rat & sad when the hawk misses. It is sad when the child encounters too early. It is sad when a mother apologizes. It is sad when the aphids have chewed holes in the lacinato kale. It is sad when there is a shopping list taped to the refrigerator. It is sad in the morning, Bach or no Bach. It is sad in winter & depending on the city sadder in the summer. It is sad to finish a book & sad to not finish. It is sad to make love imperfectly. It is sad when the body is ready but not the mind. It is sad when [ ] has left the group chat. It is sad when the wrong thing dies. It is sad when it is three in the morning & the wind is howling & the moon is like a burning umbrella oh god who will put up with me ##I Remember the Carrots by Ada Limón I haven't given up on trying to live a good life, a really good one even, sitting in the kitchen in Kentucky, imagining how agreeable I'll be— the advance of fulfillment, and of desire— all these needs met, then unmet again. When I was a kid, I was excited about carrots, their spidery neon tops in the garden's plot. And so I ripped them all out. I broke the new roots and carried them, like a prize, to my father who scolded me, rightly, for killing his whole crop. I loved them: my own bright dead things. I'm thirty-five and remember all that I've done wrong. Yesterday I was nice, but in truth I resented the contentment of the field. Why must we practice this surrender? What I mean is: there are days I still want to kill the carrots because I can. ##After Twelve Days of Rain by Dorianne Laux I couldn't name it, the sweet sadness welling up in me for weeks. So I cleaned, found myself standing in a room with a rag in my hand, the birds calling time-to-go, time-to-go. And like an old woman near the end of her life I could hear it, the voice of a man I never loved who pressed my breasts to his hips and whispered "My little doves, my white, white lillies" I could almost cry when I remember it. I don't remember when I began to call everyone "sweetie," as if they were my daughters, my darlings, my little birds. I have always loved too much, or not enough. Last night I read a poem about God and almost believed it—God sipping coffee, smoking cherry tobacco. I've arrived at a time in my life when I could believe almost anything. Today, pumping gas into my old car, I stood hatless in the rain and the whole world went silent—cars on the wet street sliding past without a sound, the attendant's mouth opening and closing on air as he walked from pump to pump, his footsteps erased in the rain—nothing but the tiny numbers in their square windows rolling by my shoulder, the unstoppable seconds gliding by as I stood at the Chevron, balancing evenly on my two feet, a gas nozzle gripped in my hand, my hair gathering rain. And I saw it didn't matter who had loved me or who I loved. I was alone. The black oily asphalt, the slick beauty of the Iranian attendant, the thickening clouds—nothing was mine. And I understood finally, after a semester of philosophy, a thousand books of poetry, after death and childbirth and the startled cries of men who called out my name as they entered me, I finally believed I was alone, felt it in my actual, visceral heart, heard it echo like a thin bell. And the sounds came back, the slish of tires and footsteps, all the delicate cargo they carried saying thank you and yes. So I paid and climbed into my car as if nothing had happened— as if everything mattered — What else could I do? I drove to the grocery store and bought wheat bread and milk, a candy bar wrapped in gold foil, smiled at the teenaged cashier with the pimpled face and the plastic name plate pinned above her small breast, and knew her secret, her sweet fear— Little bird. Little darling. She handed me my change, my brown bag, a torn receipt, pushed the cash drawer in with her hip and smiled back. ##To Hold by Li-Young Lee So we're dust. In the meantime, my wife and I make the bed. Holding opposite edges of the sheet, we raise it, billowing, then pull it tight, measuring by eye as it falls into alignment between us. We tug, fold, tuck. And if I'm lucky, she'll remember a recent dream and tell me. One day we'll lie down and not get up. One day, all we guard will be surrendered. Until then, we'll go on learning to recognize what we love, and what it takes to tend what isn't for our having. So often, fear has led me to abandon what I know I must relinquish in time. But for the moment, I'll listen to her dream, and she to mine, our mutual hearing calling more and more detail into the light of a joint and fragile keeping. ##Stop Me If You've Heard This One Before by Kaveh Akbar I can't even remember my own name, I who remember so much—football scores, magic tricks, deep love so close to God it was practically religious. When you fall asleep in that sort of love you wake up with bruises on your neck. I don't have drunks, sirs, I have adventures. Every day my body follows me around asking for things. I try to think louder, try to be brilliant, wildly brilliant (and naked though I can never be naked enough). We all want the same thing (to walk in sincere wonder, like the first man to hear a parrot speak) but we live on an enormous flatness floating between two oceans. Sometimes you just have to leave whatever's real to you, you have to clomp through fields and kick the caps off all the toadstools. Sometimes you have to march all the way to Galilee or the literal foot of God himself before you realize you've already passed the place where you were supposed to die. I can no longer remember the being afraid, only that it came to an end. ##French Novel by Richie Hofmann You were my second lover. You had dark eyes and hair, like a painting of a man. We lay on our stomachs reading books in your bed. I e-mailed my professor. I will be absent from French Novel due to sickness. You put on some piano music. Even though it was winter, we had to keep the window open day and night, the room was so hot, the air so dry it made our noses bleed. With boots we trekked through slush for a bottle of red wine we weren't allowed to buy, our shirts unbuttoned under our winter coats. The French language distinguishes between the second of two and the second of many. Of course we'd have other lovers. Snow fell in our hair. You were my second lover. Another way of saying this: you were the other, not another.