“being in love with you is fucking awful / cause one day you'll stop breathing / in this grey light you already look dead”

— Richard Scott

“the sky is blue because. / The plants are watered green because. / That silver hair on your head, / so many impossible strands!”

— Bee Morris

“What if you felt the invisible / tug between you and everything?”

— Ellen Bass

“it is almost the season of your favorite flower & the / burial ground giving way to its tiny & exploding lips & how they exist for you & no one else”

— Hanif Abdurraqib

“I was hungry, then, and my life, / my life, too, was hungry”

— Jane Hirshfield

“my lips were bruised, her body was whole again, and we danced / naked in the street. // And no child understands absence past the softness / of palms.”

— Deema K. Shehabi

“Later she tells me of the hole her mother gave her as a gift. / What do parents pass on to their kids if not all of their wounds?”

— Gbenga Adesina

“I am accused of words, / my pen the instrument. / Ink – blood of the heart – bears witness / and reads the charges.”

— Dareen Tatoour

“everyone really / at times falls into our own unspooling / —which really I think is a beautiful softness / of being human”

— Anis Mojgani

“One to peace, / one to fields and the rain, / and one / to humanity's conscience.”

— Samih Al-Qasim

“But this is how faith works its craft. / One foot set in front of the other, while the wind / rattles the cage of the living, and the rocks down there // cheer every wobble”

— Matthew Olzmann

“There is enough beauty in flowers. / I want to find beauty in suffering. / I want to fail.”

— Mikael De Lara Co

“What is this record / you play over and over: don’t get / used to it, you shouldn’t / it’s sad”

— Ahmad Almallah

“The most beautiful part of your body / is where it's headed. & remember, / loneliness is still time spent / with the world.”

— Ocean Vuong

“The branches started waving hurriedly / Then the olives joined in, screaming / Like a chorus in a symphony / Call our owners. Call our owners / But no one comes”

— Farid Bitar

“Go presently you said. Go from my window. / I am in love with your window I cannot undermine / it, I said.”

— John Ashbery

“I would like to be the air / that inhabits you for a moment / only. I would like to be that unnoticed / & that necessary.”

— Margaret Atwood

“Witness my executioner, sword dripping with my blood! / What shall expose the murderer, but our innocent bleeding?”

— Mu’in Bseiso