Light

Emma Bovary

by Monica Ferrell

I would have liked then for someone to touch me

So I could know the purpose of this hardship.

Black-eyed and impassive as a canyon,

From the hive of my mind, I looked at their faces 

As I moved between rows of espaliered pears.

I only intended for someone to show

Me, once, an affection like the sun

Shows even the simplest bulb, entering what’s hidden.

Let me show them instead the picture

In a knife’s reflection, take down my hair

Where the gravedigger kneels among new potatoes.

Behind my teeth are headstones, and behind those

Skeletons of cavemen, of dinosaurs,

And under my skin: alphabets, alphabets

In black ink, a legacy of histories tiny and alive

As an ant army marching toward forever.

Understand, please—I, too, have a splendid use,

This world could not get rid of me if it wanted to.

What Was Told, That

by Jalal al-Din Rumi, 1207 - 1273

What was said to the rose that made it open was said
to me here in my chest.

What was told the cypress that made it strong
and straight, what was

whispered the jasmine so it is what it is, whatever made
sugarcane sweet, whatever

was said to the inhabitants of the town of Chigil in
Turkestan that makes them

so handsome, whatever lets the pomegranate flower blush
like a human face, that is

being said to me now. I blush. Whatever put eloquence in
language, that’s happening here.

The great warehouse doors open; I fill with gratitude,
chewing a piece of sugarcane,

in love with the one to whom every that belongs!

Swimming

Swimming
by Carl Phillips

Some nights, I rise from the latest excuse for
Why not stay awhile, usually that hour when
the coyotes roam the streets as if they’ve always
owned the place and had come back inspecting now
for damage. But what hasn’t been damaged? History
here means a history of storms rushing the trees
for so long, their bowed shapes seem a kind of star—
worth trusting, I mean, as in how the helmsman,
steering home, knows what star to lean on. Do
people, anymore, even say helmsman? Everything
in waves, or at least wave-like, as when another’s
suffering, being greater, displaces our own, or
I understand it should, which is meant to be
different, I’m sure of it, from that pleasure
Lucretius speaks of, in witnessing from land
a ship foundering at sea, though more and more
it all seems related. I love the nights here. I love
the jetty’s black ghost-finger, how it calms
the harbor, how the fog hanging stranded just
above the water is fog, finally, not the left-behind
parts of those questions from which I half-wish
I could school my mind, desperate cargo,
to keep a little distance. An old map from when
this place was first settled shows monsters
everywhere, once the shore gives out—it can still
feel like that: I dive in, and they rise like faithfulness
itself, watery pallbearers heading seaward, and
I the raft they steady. It seems there’s no turning back.

Undone

Hermitage

by Joseph Fasano

It’s true there were times when it was too much
and I slipped off in the first light or its last hour
and drove up through the crooked way of the valley

and swam out to those ruins on an island.
Blackbirds were the only music in the spruces,
and the stars, as they faded out, offered themselves to me

like glasses of water ringing by the empty linens of the dead.
When Delilah watched the dark hair of her lover
tumble, she did not shatter. When Abraham

relented, he did not relent.
Still, I would tell you of the humbling and the waking.
I would tell you of the wild hours of surrender,

when the river stripped the cove’s stones
from the margin and the blackbirds built
their strict songs in the high

pines, when the great nests swayed the lattice
of the branches, the moon’s brute music
touching them with fire.

And you, there, stranger in the sway
of it, what would you have done
there, in the ruins, when they rose

from you, when the burning wings
ascended, when the old ghosts
shook the music from your branches and the great lie

of your one sweet life was lifted?

Spring Running Playlist

Fall Out Boy – Uma Thurman 

Wyclef Jean Ft. Avicii – Divine Sorrow

DJ Snake & AlunaGeorge – You Know You Like It

Giorgio Moroder Ft. Sia – Déjà vu

Odesza Ft. Zyra – It’s Only

Panic! At the Disco – Hallelujah

Misterwives – Reflections 

X Ambassadors – Renegades

Broods – Mother & Father

Banks – Beggin’ for a Thread

OMI – Cheerleader

Odessa – Hummed Low