How To Take a Life

Janel Pineda

Keep a son from his mother until her last breath.

         When she goes, all she’ll know of him is desert

heat, folded letters, a phantom of his sixteen-year-old self outside

         her nursing home window, unable to come inside. Venite,

Chepito, venite. If he could, he’d leave the gang, leave the gun,

         come home. Venite. If he could, he’d disappear the war,

his father’s strike, his father’s stroke. If he could, he’d

         pick a different place, a different time, free his hands

of any crime, of any charge. When he goes, all he’ll know

         of her is the faint fatigue of her voice, her full name tattooed

beneath his throat. When he goes, all he’ll know of life is

         every inch of a cell, the way the decades flew by, and how he was made

to rot, alone.

The Abduction

Stanley Kunitz

1905 –2006

Some things I do not profess 

to understand, perhaps

not wanting to, including

whatever it was they did

with you or you with them

that timeless summer day

when you stumbled out of the wood,

distracted, with your white blouse torn

and a bloodstain on your skirt.

"Do you believe?" you asked.

Between us, through the years,

we pieced enough together

to make the story real:

how you encountered on the path

a pack of sleek, grey hounds,

trailed by a dumbshow retinue

in leather shrouds; and how

you were led, through leafy ways,

into the presence of a royal stag,

flaming in his chestnut coat,

who kneeled on a swale of moss

before you; and how you were borne

aloft in triumph through the green,

stretched on his rack of budding horn,

till suddenly you found yourself alone

in a trampled clearing.

That was a long time ago,

almost another age, but even now, 

when I hold you in my arms, 

I wonder where you are.

Sometimes I wake to hear

the engines of the night thrumming

outside the east bay window

on the lawn spreading to the rose garden.

You lie beside me in elegant repose,

a hint of transport hovering on your lips,

indifferent to the harsh green flares

that swivel through the room,

searchlights controlled by unseen hands.

Out there is a childhood country,

bleached faces peering in

with coals for eyes.

Our lives are spinning out

from world to world;

the shapes of things

are shifting in the wind.

What do we know

beyond the rapture and the dread?

The Summer Day

Mary Oliver

1935 –2019

Who made the world? Who made the swan, and the black bear? Who made the grasshopper? This grasshopper, I mean— the one who has flung herself out of the grass, the one who is eating sugar out of my hand, who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down— who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes. Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face. Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away. I don’t know exactly what a prayer is. I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass, how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields, which is what I have been doing all day. Tell me, what else should I have done? Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

Honestly

John Ashbery

1927 –2017

we could send you out there

to join the cackle squad,

but hey, that highly accomplished,

thinly regarded equestrian—well there was no way

he was going to join the others’ field trip.

Wouldn’t put his head on the table.

But here’s the thing:

They had owned great dread,

knew of a way to get away from here

through ice and smoke

always clutching her fingers, like it says

to do.

Once we were passionate about the police,

yawned in the teeth of pixels,

but a far rumor blanked us out.

We bathed in moonshine.

Now, experts disagree.

Were we unhappy or sublime?

We’ll have to wait until the next time

an angel comes rapping at the door

to rejoice docently.

(I know there’s a way to do this.)

The Dance of the Lambs and the Birds

Ameen AnimashaunGreen, 

and green, and suddenly            a light trapped in a soft shell.                        Above the city of Jericho, the chickens are coming home             to roost. I rewrite history                         and keep the apple where no handcan reach it. Sinai because             your breath is fear. Pisgah                         because your touch is hurt.I am scared of all that I am              capable of. To break a body                         is to know it  for what it truly is. You say this              is love, so I surrender my wants                         at your feet. To know a body is to break it wide open, and I have grown              to love everything about nothing.                         Out in the wilderness, the guard dog is eating a thunderstorm              and the night’s skin is an eye                         sore. Damn the consequences. I trace the lone graph of my body              and study its careful intricacies. Then,                         like you, I lift the nothingness of me above my head and tip it over              the blade of rocks. I do not want to bury anything                        I do not want to bury. Copyright © 2025 by Ameen Animashaun

From “traslaciones” [to sell the wasteland teeming with ghosts]

Wingston González

translated from the Spanish by Urayoán Noel to sell the wasteland teeming with ghosts the cavernous tongues hanging in the sun the flanks skyfacing the braids they sold the countryside naked and frozen the red roof of the tabernacle the flag and an immense tv glued to my history still early a funeral on the cartoon network : in whose full darkness i am subjected linguistic philosophical variant of the little bones of angela yvonne davis dislocation of the mississippi body i be of a stairway on the trembling coast down south they found the dead bodies of the divers that we sent to look for my skeleton we are at best the treasures that sank with the disheveled ships of civilization

Garden Abstract

Hart Crane

1899 –1932

The apple on its bough is her desire,—Shining suspension, mimic of the sun.

The bough has caught her breath up, and her voice,

Dumbly articulate in the slant and rise

Of branch on branch above her, blurs her eyes.

She is prisoner of the tree and its green fingers.

And so she comes to dream herself the tree,

The wind possessing her, weaving her young veins,

Holding her to the sky and its quick blue,

Drowning the fever of her hands in sunlight.

She has no memory, nor fear, nor hope

Beyond the grass and shadows at her feet.