1
The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree
Dust of Snow/ Robert Frost
2
walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.
Introduction to Poetry/ Bill Collins
3
a wound in the exact shape of your words
Why Bother?/ Sean Thomas Dougherty
4
Let her pretend. She needs one person
who doesn’t know.
& she never had to say she was dying.
Holdfast/ Robin Beth Schaer
5
The squirrel
In her stomach
Trying to get out—
Bel Canto/ Jane Yeh
6
trees are our lungs turned inside out
& inhale our visible chilled breath.
our lungs are trees turned inside out
& inhale their clear exhalations.
Inside Out/ Bill Yake
7
it was such a natural
think it was too plain
to see until you saw
it for me in your poem
The Poet to the Reader/ James Laughlin
8
the unrestrained
joy I feel when a black skein of geese voyages like a dropped
string from God, slowly shifting and soaring…
when driving and the road Vanna-Whites its crops
of corn whose stalks will soon give way to a harvester’s blade
and turn the land to a man’s unruly face, makes me believe
I will never soothe the pagan in me, nor exhibit the propriety
of the polite.
Thinking of Frost/ Major Jackson
9
then at dusk drinking wine,
waiting for the happy obliteration alcohol brings,
not realizing how lucky they were
to be stupid and so deep
in their bodies even the sun
and moon trading places over and over
meant nothing.
Same Sun, Same Moon, Same River/ Neil Carpathios
10
Is a caesura a quiet hallway
in a church? Is it a silence
with commandments to hush,
listen?
Weight/ Carolina Ebeid
11
Those who knew
what was going on here
must make way for
those who know little.
And less than little.
And finally as little as nothing.
At the End and the Beginning/ Wis£awe Szymborska
12
Time never stops, but does it end? And how many lives
Before take-off, before we find ourselves
Beyond ourselves, all glam-glow, all twinkle and gold?
Don’t You Ever Wonder?/ Tracy K. Smith
13
The trouble with elegy
is that it asks the dead
to live, it calls them back.
& who am I to say rise?
Anti-Elegy/ Cameron Awkward-Rich
14
The Wind is sewing with needles of rain.
With shining needles of rain
It stitches into the thin
Cloth of earth. In,
In, in, in.
Two Sewing/ Hazel Hall