#stephen dunn

She taught theater, so we gathered in the theater. We praised her voice, her knowledge, how good she was with Godot and just four months later with Gigi. She was fifty. The problem in the liver. Each of us recalled an incident in which she'd been kind or witty. I told about being unable to speak from my diaphragm and how she made me lie down, placed her hand where the failure was and showed me how to breathe. But afterwards I only could do it when I lay down and that became a joke between us, and I told it as my offering to the audience. I was on stage and I heard myself wishing to be impressive. Someone else spoke of her cats and no one spoke of her face or the last few parties. The fact was I had avoided her for months. It was a student's turn to speak, a sophomore, one of her actors. She was a drunk, he said, often came to class reeking. Sometimes he couldn't look at her, the blotches, the awful puffiness. And yet she was a great teacher, he loved her, but thought someone should say what everyone knew because she didn't die by accident. Everyone was crying. Everyone was crying and it was almost over now. The remaining speaker, an historian, said he'd cut his speech short. And the Chairman stood up as if by habit, said something about loss and thanked us for coming. None of us moved except some students to the student who'd spoken, and then others moved to him, across dividers, down aisles, to his side of the stage.

Good Bones by Maggie Smith | archive.org

Middle Age by Jason Shinder | archive.org

Death Comes to Me Again, a Girl by Dorianne Laux | archive.org

Prints by Joseph Bruchac | archive.org

Molly Brodak by Molly Brodak | archive.org

Connubial by Stephen Dunn | archive.org

What I Didn’t Know Before by Ada Limón | archive.org

Laura, I Want You Pulling Your Hair Back by Natalie Dunn | archive.org

O Small Sad Ecstasy of Love by Anne Carson | archive.org

Small Frogs Killed on the Highway by James Wright | archive.org

Post-Factual Love Poem by Paul Guest | archive.org

Tomorrow is a Place by Sanna Wani | archive.org

Make Out Sonnet by F. Douglas Brown | archive.org

If any of the links you come across are dead, the archive.org link should redirect you to a post that should always be up!