Traveling through the Dark By William Stafford Traveling through the dark I found a deer dead on the edge of the Wilson River road. It is usually best to roll them into the canyon: that road is narrow; to swerve might make more dead. By glow of the tail-light I stumbled back of the car and stood by the heap, a doe, a recent killing; she had stiffened already, almost cold. I dragged her off; she was large in the belly. My fingers touching her side brought me the reason— her side was warm; her fawn lay there waiting, alive, still, [...]

Dulce et Decorum Est by Wilfred Owen Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge, Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs And towards our distant rest began to trudge. Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind; Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind. Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling, Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time; But someone still was yelling out and stumbling And flound'ring like a man in fire or [...]

We Real Cool Gwendolyn Brooks                    THE POOL PLAYERS.                     SEVEN AT THE GOLDEN SHOVEL. We real cool. We Left school. We Lurk late. We Strike straight. We Sing sin. We Thin gin. We Jazz June. We Die soon.

Cause of Death Sandra Gustin These are times when judicial proceedings would do well to include a linguist, a forensic linguist...             —El País, Catalan Edition, 27 March 2018 A foreigner, I walk Barcelona breathless, marveling at files of school children laughing, chatting as teachers shepherd them in Catalan, at street signs in the same language, at elderly men and elderly women on benches or peering down from balconies, once shamed or worse for speaking this, their heart language, gossiping now in short words ending in plosives, in fricative zh´s and sh´s not found in Spanish, all in my lifetime, and I [...]

14 Love Songs Elizabeth Jacobson Above a pond, I sit on a wooden bench and throw pebbles into the willows. A rush of sunlight and wind creates a path in a channel of water, dances between the melting ice and brown islands of bulrush. The resident osprey, its eyes the color of yellow grass, follows my tossing hand. Love is a diorama of inner life in an outer world. I look down and find a chunk of fossilized rock with an entire Paleozoic shell sticking out. I am not afraid of love, but terrified of how it is my steady guide. [...]

Cut Lilies Noah Warren More than a hundred dollars of them. It was pure folly. I had to find more glass things to stuff them in. Now a white and purple cloud is breathing in each corner of the room I love. Now a mass of flowers spills down my dining table— each fresh-faced, extending its delicately veined leaves into the crush. Didn’t I watch children shuffle strictly in line, cradle candles that dribbled hot white on their fingers, chanting Latin—just to fashion Sevilla’s Easter? Wasn’t I sad? Didn’t I use to go mucking through streambeds with the skunk cabbage raising [...]