From Louise Bogan:

You have learned the beginning;
Go from mine to the other.

Be together; eat, dance, despair,
Sleep, be threatened, endure.
You will know the way of that.

But at the end, be insolent;
Be absurd—strike the thing short off;
Be mad—only do not let talk
Wear the bloom from silence.

And go away without fire or lantern
Let there be some uncertainty about your departure.

– Words for Departure

From Cate Marvin:

Sheet marks on the face won’t disappear into
the water filling the basin. Under the eyes dark
lakes before the resinous reflection of window
cast into mirror by interior lights set against
the night. Do you wonder if I dream of your
shattering? Marks on the face don’t melt into
the water. It would be strange to dream that
hard for a stranger, even for you who became
strange within an hour.

– Two Views of a Discarded Mattress

From Tracy K. Smith

I love you in the water
Where they pretended to wade,
Singing that old blood-deep song
That dragged us to those banks
And cast us in. I love you,
The angles of it scraping at
Each throat, shouldering past
The swirling dust motes
In those beams of light
That whatever we now knew
We could let ourselves feel, knew
To climb.

– Wade in the Water

From Megan Merchant:

Vacancy is not an adequate splint for love. I was told to treasure
the red dust that grained in my hair and ears, the phantom
rain, the flat-earthers who gathered and measured the arc of sunset—
the shape of the world is as good of a religion as any,
but my god, have you heard the panged-song of coyotes, their
voice-wound loud, not afraid to tremble, not stomping
to smooth the cracks, or pausing in the open long enough
to pull the yucca spines from their skin.

– The Years We Lived in the Desert

From Sarah Colona:

That anatomy, its bony plates and antibiotic blood, insures resilience.
We armor ourselves similarly, collect our epithets like gems. Ending

any story is a challenge: one sees grit within the grifter. Another purls
thundercloud to thundercloud just to survive. I’ve known many Sarahs
who wear their genesis with indifference.

– From One Sarah to Another

From Cheryl Clarke:

I don’t do well with
expectation. Come up
here if it’s too cool a
story below with your
windows cracked.
Higher is warmer
in this last,
fast
phantasmic
interval.

– Brief Interval

From Mahtem Shiferraw:

these trees, blood-free and bone-dry
have come to rescue me more than once,

but my saving often requires hiding
yet they stand so tall, so slim and gluttonous

refusing to contain me; even baobab trees
will split open at my command, and

carve out fleshless wombs to welcome me.
I must fall out of love of the world

without me in it, but my loves have
long gone

– We, Made of Bone