at what point do I stop looking back / wishing I’d known better?
—Eli Karren

When the interviewer asks if there is any other place you can go, you’ll say no while biting down the excuses your godmother made up for not taking you in.
—Rose Banks

what has our tongue? / what has our tongue that this river don’t?
—Henry Goldkamp

I am fourteen / & razor-sharp when I ask how much he loves me. My // question is horrible. His answer is always infinite.
—Amy Jarvis

So I come home / to simplify myself. I light my pipe and burn / the fractals off my bronchi.
—Tian-Ai

The grass is filthy, the dirt path too dusty, the day too hot, but I have to see it through his eyes.
—Adam Berlin

Out back by the sunflowers is the pet cemetery, and in the lilac grove, the secret cemetery where his mother buried the cats and small dogs he killed and brought home, people’s pets.
—Elizabeth Kerlikowske

She stared at the boy, and I thought to myself, she sees. She knows it, too.
—Alyson Mosquera Dutemple

What if she believes?
Will Iouanaloa come
and live inside her?
Even here in the Midwest,
with its grey quilted sky?
—Catherine Esther Cowie