Excerpts from “How to be Perfect” by Ron Padgett Get some sleep. Eat an orange every morning. Be friendly. It will help make you happy. Hope for everything. Expect nothing. Take care of things close to home first. Straighten up your room before you save the world. Then save the world. Be nice to […]

Advice to Myself by Jane Hirshfield The computer file of which I have no recollection is labeled “advice to myself” I click it open look scroll further down the screen stays backlit and empty thus I meet myself again hopeful and useless a mystery precisely as I must have done on August 19, 2010, 11:08 […]

BLT by Barbara Crooker Enjoy every sandwich. —Warren Zevon, talking with David Letterman about his terminal lung cancer shortly before his death. Here’s how to make a great sandwich: country white bread lightly toasted, contoured with mayonnaise, leaf lettuce spilling over the borders, overlays of tomatoes, train tracks of bacon leading straight out of town. […]

As I Walked Out One Evening by W.H. Auden As I walked out one evening, Walking down Bristol Street, The crowds upon the pavement Were fields of harvest wheat. And down by the brimming river I heard a lover sing Under an arch of the railway: ‘Love has no ending. ‘I’ll love you, dear, I’ll […]

Winter: Tonight: Sunset by David Budbill Tonight at sunset walking on the snowy road, my shoes crunching on the frozen gravel, first through the woods, then out into the open fields past a couple of trailers and some pickup trucks, I stop and look at the sky. Suddenly: orange, red, pink, blue, green, purple, yellow, […]

Over the Edge by Wendell Berry To tell a girl you loved her—my God!— that was a leap off a cliff, requiring little sense, sweet as it was. And I have loved many girls, women too, who by various fancies of my mind have seemed loveable. But only with you have I actually tried it: […]