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Hope It hovers in dark corners before the lights are turned on,      it shakes sleep from its eyes      and drops from mushroom gills,           it explodes in the starry heads           of dandelions turned sages,                it sticks to the wings of green angels                that sail from the tops of maples. It sprouts in each occluded eye of the many-eyed potato,      it lives in each earthworm segment      surviving cruelty,           it is the motion that runs           from the eyes to the tail of a dog,                it is the mouth that inflates the lungs                of the child that has just been born. It is the singular gift we cannot destroy in ourselves, the argument that refutes death, the genius that invents the future, all we know of God. It is the serum which makes us swear not to betray one another; it is in this poem, trying to speak. —Lisel Mueller

The Exchange Now my body flat, the ground breathes, I’ll be the grass. Populous and mixed is mind. Earth take thought, my mouth be moss. Field go walking, I a disk will look down with seeming eye, I will be time and study to be evening. You world, be clock. I will stand, a tree here, never to know another spot. Wind be motion, birds be passion, water invite me to your bed. —May Swenson

Consider the Hands that Write this Letter after Marina Wilson Consider the hands that write this letter. Left palm pressed flat against paper, as we have done before, over my heart, in peace or reverence to the sea, some beautiful thing I saw once, felt once: snow falling like rice flung from the giants’ wedding, or strangest of strange birds. & consider, then, the right hand, & how it is a fist, within which a sharpened utensil, similar to the way I’ve held a spade, the horse’s reins, loping, the very fists I’ve seen from roads through Limay & Estelí. For years, I have come to sit this way: one hand open, one hand closed, like a farmer who puts down seeds & gathers up; food will come from that farming. Or, yes, it is like the way I’ve danced with my left hand opened around a shoulder, my right hand closed inside of another hand. & how I pray, I pray for this to be my way: sweet work alluded to in the body’s position to its paper: left hand, right hand like an open eye, an eye closed: one hand flat against the trapdoor, the other hand knocking, knocking. —Aracelis Girmay

       prairie wants —Camille T. Dungy

Walking in the Woods That’s when I saw the old maple a couple of its thick arms cracked one arm reclining half rotted into earth     black with the delicious hospitality of rot to the littlest creatures the tree not really dying     living less widely     green head high above the other leaf-crowded trees     a terrible stretch to sun just to stay alive     but if you’ve liked life     you do it —Grace Paley

A Year After I First Loved Haikyuu, Etel and I discuss what I deserve. If I could name my favorite two philosophers, they would be the ones present in this poem. Etel, I don't always understand you. But, I have lived in a city where you lived and to it we both owe something. On the eve of your death, I read a book I have described with the word guilt, with the word witness, with the word distance. If there are two texts I believe everyone should read, they would be the ones present in this poem. What art has invited you to treat yourself better? What art invited you to include care as inherent to craft? And how will you repay the invitation? I am afraid of my beloveds finding me ragged. I am failing the spirituality I employ when I talk about In the heart of the heart of another country. A year ago, I was delirious with an art that loved me back, frenzied with a desire to let it better me. For a moment, maybe, I believed in it, too. But there is always a fall, even if I know my story is not finished. What can you do for the art you love in return? How can I honor you? How can I honor you? —Summer Farah

Why A Man Cannot Have Wings Because he will crash land on his head, assuming it to be The strongest part of his body. Because someone will put up a sign that reads: Do Not Step on the Cirrus Clouds. Because it does not even take a man hundreds of feet above Sea-level to learn contempt. Because there will be new categories of handicaps: bow-wings, Ostrich disease, scaly feathers, carousel flight syndrome, Or at a freak show: The Amazing Wingless Wonder. Because he will have a new weapon, gravity, And everything he releases becomes a missile, Even glass marbles, books, the fatal music box. Because he is lonely enough without being able to Frame the house he lives in between his forefinger and thumb. Because then the sky will shed its metaphors of freedom And become another path for him to carry his burdens. Because there will be a popular form of suicide: Flying into foreign airspace and being gunned down; All it takes is a nose-tip to press an invisible blue button. Because each death in mid-air, each comic comet plunge, Will be another enactment of the fall of Man. Because in concentration camps people will break wings And use the feathers for quills to write sonnets And pillow stuffing for innocent dreams. Because he will have less to fantasize about, less of miracles And the word ‘levitation’ will not exist. Because there will be children who will empty their bladders Under cloud cover in an attempt to make yellow snow. And because he might get the wrong notion that he is closer To heaven, when he has not even come to a mile Within the presence of angels, despite the resemblance. —Alfian bin Sa’at

In Respect to the Jellyfish Because we occupy the wrong animal—don’t you too feel it? —Lucia Perillo Even the gelatinous—moon jellies, giant jellies, sea gooseberries, and by-the-wind sailors that litter the beach—have lived their animal lives and left a shiny trace that lasts only for a while. Like our own dead, some are still capable of stinging. I step carefully as I look through them, their jellied bodies on the sand melting into gleam, as if they’ve never known where they end and the world begins. So they dangle in the ocean with a certain uncertainty at the edges, empty in their fullness and filled by their emptiness. Why wouldn’t I be content to float day and night, to let my ambivalence take the form of water shoving me this way and that? To need no protection of bone and leave no fossil, living without architecture, outside of history. —Susan Cohen