Some call this cloud work, some call / this clever crows riding the updrafts.

Carolyn Hembree’s For Today is a triumph of Mississippi Delta poetry.

Who you are, what made me assent—all I know’s I was hopeful and bored / reposing in the Delta Sky Club

Isabella Rosselini said she loved her father’s big belly / because it reminded her of how he used to sit in bed / all day writing

My Jewish wife and I / went into the Old City / through Damascus Gate / to eat sweet orange squares of knafeh.

I was shimmying on stage, apoplectic in the harsh blue neons, when I remembered I have loved you my whole life.

Her body and mine are the same shape. By reason, this means mine can be touched. I still can’t stomach it.

After death the heart sometimes keeps beating / a little. Or after it’s removed / from the body.

For months, small gold crowns have fallen from the sky.

My mother wrote a poem on her deathbed / after five bleak months of leukemia. / Something in Arabic to the effect of, Why me?

“Define Situationship” should really / be a Jeopardy! question

As an undergraduate at NYU, Daniel Lefferts found mythical beings: students at the Stern School of Business. They eschewed the de rigueur American Apparel hoodies and skinny jeans in favor of Patagonia vests, khakis.

I thought I was undesirable. Unlovable, sounding / Just like a Bachelor lead, with way less privilege, not / Kissing generically gorgeous ladies in Forever 21 gowns.

I’ve never worked at a fish processing plant, but I’ve met a few people who have.

Well, a lot happens in our lives every day. We experience so many things and most of what we experience—most of what we see and feel and smell and touch and taste—we forget. Because there's just too much information to take in. But the things that lodge in our minds and that come back to us as memories or that we hold on to, I think there's a reason. And that's because it's a poem waiting to happen.

When the water recedes, a flock of / small stones appears along the shore

Foxes keep showing up. Their voice contains a baby crying at night.

Meanwhile, my sister and I / rate our father’s revenge stories by punchline.

Memoirist, editor extraordinaire, and dedicated literary citizen, it’s hard to miss Lilly Dancyger either out in the world or across the internet’s literary platforms

It’s not the first time / someone did wrong, and you / smelled your blame

Is it really warranted, for you to bring a gun to New York, city of high achievement? Thoughtless we both stood, me, trying to talk you down from taking an overdose of cerulean powder, you, intent on ingesting a headlamp so you could witness the inner beatings of your gut.

One afternoon of his every-other-Saturdays, my dad took the crossbow gingerly, respectfully from its box on the top shelf of his bedroom closet and led us out onto the apartment’s second-story back porch, a cement slab overlooking the train tracks.

Today I’m learning satin’s splendor, a tight ribbon-wristed free- / Dom orbiting my pulse. What is it that you want, love? To be tied / Is a [hypo]thesis on trust: not if pain should find me, but that / If it does, you’ll see me through it.

Rationalizing didn’t help. No matter how much he told himself that this was a different woman, that it couldn’t be the same widow, he couldn’t escape the gut certainty that she was.