More on: Poetry

Your heart stands wide for all to enter in: it should have been a door for me alone.

do these monks with their straight lines / and right angles have the only franchise?

Last words from death row. “I love you endlessly, my honeybird.”

Two women, in separate instances, each blessed and healed a child in her care. Neither of these women had ever discussed the blessing with anyone before for fear it would be considered “inappropriate.” Another woman gathered her sister’s frail, cancer-ridden body in her arms and blessed her with one pain-free day.

Of course, we too came here / hoping to be cracked open, amazed.

‘Speak to us of poetry and politics,’ / he said to me from his seat in the audience / as I was on stage.

I lifted the calendar from / / its nail and thumbed through the other Marys: / a stylish Guadalupe radiating needles / for October, Michelangelo’s marble / draped in the corpse of Christ for March

Is it possible / that your experience / is a form of joy? / Or a word for joy, / in an unspeakable / tongue.

Katherine Mooney Brooks on art, illness, and the failures of the body

We played a word game on the mountain, / spelled cuneiform, spelled thoracic: / / the game’s strict rules / encourage motion / / up through thistles, saffron, / yellow stains