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I was talking to preachy-preach about kissy-kiss

-Pixies, "Bone Machine"
Lucy's baby is born green, face splotched with yellow like variegated leaves, hair wispy white, corncob cornsilk.

-Tessa Mellas, "Beanstalk"

In the quiet aftermath of this small personal disaster a single / ray of light sliced a line too bright to face a divide

-Alice B. Fogel, "House of Habit"

Under ruined branches, apples / fell like hearts.

-Joanna L. Kaminski, "Faith"
And when the wind rose at night we heard / the barn swallows gather and land inside us.

-Molly Bashaw, "There Were No Mirrors in That Farmhouse"
Drawing stars, and drawing firs, gentleness comes to open the vein.

-Sarah Gridley, "Charcoal"
My lips have tasted golden bees in the rowans, / spring water running from Mount Funiu.

-Lan Lan, "Mother" (trans. Fiona Sze-Lorrain)
Then comes the sun and draws its cutlass.

-Danniel Schoonebeek, "Genealogy (rest)"
Forks can't solve it any more than a kettle.

-Steven Cramer, from "Clangings"
The best apples are burnt out stars getting time off for bad behavior.

-Cory Van Landingham, "Orchard"
Last night the dog star stood above my bed --

-Peter Cooley, "Imperialism"
The lake will take on the hue of snowflakes unembarrassed by nakedness

-Daneen Wardrop, "Stir the Lake"

Sometimes it was like an actress was playing her, living in that strange cinderblock house,...the border between real and cartoon becoming harder to distinguish

-Jill Logan, "Tropism"

Yesterday she walked out of the woods and into a meadow

-Angie DeCola, "Learned Ever to Pine"
To each house came an invitation, silk-edged / and engraved, to the hanging in Concord in May.

-Cate Whetzel, "The Hanging of Frank C. Almy..."
In our mouths and palms, death and / the dream of death are one, / thanks to time.

-Christopher Salerno, "Ahead of Schedule"
Tape me to your eyelids : you'll see why beauty hurts

-Deborah Bogen, "Barbed Wire"

& if we put the tree back / into the ground in our yard, / a Christmas come in June / & if we were to unspool gold / ribbons through its lower branches

-Carolina Ebeid, "Epithalamium"

The flames groped the ceiling, Peter, and the smoke from the pages blackened their faces like coal soot.

-Robert Kloss, "When Are You Going to Finish Don Quixote?"

If you were a whale / and I a ship, I'd see you / coming for me

-Kevin Ducey, "Beauty, first whale then monkey"
I listen to the rain fall like apology, / kneading the pillow to its fresher side.

-Amy Fleury, "Two Solitudes"
She is her own apple her own various worm and wax

-Renee Ashley, "She Thinks about the Shapes Things Take"

But the yellow-beaked night / bird - in the moonlight, / in the clover, / in the deep deep grass - / could hold me, / always

-Donika Ross, "Perhaps you tire of birds"

When they were ten and lost their friends, it took my breath away.

-Katharine Haake, "Diptych: Chrysalis, Prayer"

I'll rush along a gypsy camp of a dark street / In a black spring carriage chasing a bird cherry branch,

-Osip Mandelstam, "I'll rush along a gypsy camp..." (trans. Ian Probstein)

Towards the east the snow-capped peak of Mt. Hood appeared at once tactile and impossibly distant, the craggy summit redolent of both beauty and death.

-Matthew Vollono, "Samaritan"

The howl boiled up through the soles of Everill's feet.

-Ann Gelder, "Origin"

Trying to mother / these days the Devil courts me, writes his names / in my journal, my mirror, my mornings filled / with hanging smoke

-Wendy Noonan, "Lord, help me eat them bitter words"

The sun was rising, and we were alone. For a moment, her strained face was luminous in the dawn light.

-Steven Schwartz, "So This Is It"
I love you badly, Phantom, whose absolute brilliance assigns you to this zone.

-Jeffrey Pethybridge, "[Twenty thousand songs]"
Am antsy starfish. / On a mirror above a mirror.

-Greg Wrenn, "Circumcision"
All we've built by mind and fist / is ravishingly stealable, in wait / of liberation.

-Megan Grumbling, "The Heist"
Some days I clean the rifle so it shines, / A steel slice of darkness in grease-stained hands.

-Hugh Martin, "Sonnet, M-16A2 Assault Rifle"

Standing in the wind makes a wilderness / for the tribe to wander untethered by thought / quieted by mountains' grief

-Lee Sharkey, "When I fled it followed when I froze it slid forward"

We were a different kind of fool then, trimmed / stiff by patterns like stars we'd forget / except they held the night and sidewalks through it.

-Jill Osier, "Brother"

I could be thinking of a color, a girl, and suddenly it will be there large, / and gray and waiting for accuracy.

-Geffrey Davis, "Revising the Storm, 1991"

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