Imaginary Conversation By Linda Pastan You tell me to live each day as if it were my last. This is in the kitchen where before coffee I complain of the day ahead—that obstacle race of minutes and hours, grocery stores and doctors. But why the last? I ask. Why not live each day as if […]

Downpour By Billy Collins Last night we ended up on the couch trying to remember all of the friends who had died so far, and this morning I wrote them down in alphabetical order on the flip side of a shopping list you had left on the kitchen table. So many of them had been […]

A Supermarket in California BY ALLEN GINSBERG What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking at the full moon. In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations! What peaches […]

To A Daughter Leaving Home by Linda Pastan When I taught you at eight to ride a bicycle, loping along beside you as you wobbled away on two round wheels, my own mouth rounding in surprise when you pulled ahead down the curved path of the park, I kept waiting for the thud of your […]

Crush, Supermarket, California BY JAN-HENRY GRAY It’s easy to fall in love with the grocery store boys— the one with the tiny coffee cup sweatshirt, too-tight pants & cotton shoes or the impossibly pale fish boy who smiles when he says, I’m from Alaska. Your heart swelled, stupid & dreaming of a boat in arctic […]

They Dance Through Granelli’s By Pat Emile He finds her near the stack of green plastic baskets waiting to be filled and circles her waist with his left arm, entwines her fingers in his, pulls her toward him, Muzak from the ceiling shedding a flashy Salsa, and as they begin to move, she lets her […]

The Voice by Thomas Hardy Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me, Saying that now you are not as you were When you had changed from the one who was all to me, But as at first, when our day was fair. Can it be you that I hear? Let me […]

The Props assist the House by Emily Dickinson The Props assist the House Until the House is built And then the Props withdraw And adequate, erect, The House support itself And cease to recollect The Auger and the Carpenter— Just such a retrospect Hath the perfected Life— A past of Plank and Nail And slowness—then […]

One of the Butterflies by W. S. Merwin The trouble with pleasure is the timing it can overtake me without warning and be gone before I know it is here it can stand facing me unrecognized while I am remembering somewhere else in another age or someone not seen for years and never to be […]

Making Mountains As We Run by Amanda Gorman How would we read the Harvard arms, If we took another look? The letters of veritas, Tossed across Three open books, Like eight simple seeds? I’d saywe can read this creed Not just in the words, but in the deeds Of the man we celebrate today. A […]