Émigré ~ © Jose Varghese

No one ever asks why your home failed to contain you. They assume you’ve just grown out of it. But the signs are too clear now - you lose the bliss of belonging anywhere once home kicks you out. But you smile, and never speak of the swaying ways doors locked you out, eyes showed you the way away, mouths shut tight in frowns, as you tread indifference, to find a way out. Only a guava tree in your courtyard tried to stop you with a thud of an over-ripe fruit falling down, breaking open, its red flesh a wound that would never heal. But you couldn’t stop the words that formed you, the thoughts that made you grow - each, a leap of faith. You heard footsteps in the dark coming to hunt them down. You went away, aimless, escaped to endless wandering, spent a lifetime seeing guava in persimmon, tasting the bliss of being nothing. One day a pavement vendor, the next an office clerk in stiff shirt, and then, when you make the mark, a character full of depth - someone who could be played by Sidney Poitier, or Denzel Washington; and then, a speck of dirt in a street, a being of nothing. They celebrate your wronged, diminished life. They envy the power of your scars, long for your perpetual loneliness, fight for the ground that doesn’t exist beneath your feet. ('Luminous Echoes' anthology, Dublin: 2016)

Harlem | Langston Hughes

What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore— And then run? Does it stink like rotten meat? Or crust and sugar over— like a syrupy sweet? Maybe it just sags like a heavy load. Or does it explode?

More Lies - Karin Gottshall

Sometimes I say I’m going to meet my sister at the café— even though I have no sister—just because it’s such a beautiful thing to say. I’ve always thought so, ever since I read a novel in which two sisters were constantly meeting in cafés. Today, for example, I walked alone on the wet sidewalk, wearing my rain boots, expecting someone might ask where I was headed. I bought a steno pad and a watch battery, the store windows fogged up. Rain in April is a kind of promise, and it costs nothing. I carried a bag of books to the café and ordered tea. I like a place that’s lit by lamps. I like a place where you can hear people talk about small things, like the difference between azure and cerulean, and the price of tulips. It’s going down. I watched someone who could be my sister walk in, shaking the rain from her hair. I thought, even now florists are filling their coolers with tulips, five dollars a bundle. All over the city there are sisters. Any one of them could be mine.

Self-Compassion by James Crews

My friend and I snickered the first time we heard the meditation teacher, a grown man, call himself honey, with a hand placed over his heart to illustrate how we too might become more gentle with ourselves and our runaway minds. It’s been years since we sat with legs twisted on cushions, holding back our laughter, but today I found myself crouched on the floor again, not meditating exactly, just agreeing to be still, saying honey to myself each time I thought about my husband splayed on the couch with aching joints and fever from a tick bite—what if he never gets better?— or considered the threat of more wildfires, the possible collapse of the Gulf Stream, then remembered that in a few more minutes, I’d have to climb down to the cellar and empty the bucket I placed beneath a leaky pipe that can’t be fixed until next week. How long do any of us really have before the body begins to break down and empty its mysteries into the air? Oh honey, I said—for once without a trace of irony or blush of shame— the touch of my own hand on my chest like that of a stranger, oddly comforting in spite of the facts. Copyright © 2021 by James Crews. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on November 17, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.

The Mower BY PHILIP LARKIN

The Mower BY PHILIP LARKIN The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found A hedgehog jammed up against the blades, Killed. It had been in the long grass. I had seen it before, and even fed it, once. Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world Unmendably. Burial was no help: Next morning I got up and it did not. The first day after a death, the new absence Is always the same; we should be careful Of each other, we should be kind While there is still time.

The Time Around Scars by Michael Ondaatje

A girl whom I’ve not spoken to or shared coffee with for several years writes of an old scar. On her wrist it sleeps, smooth and white, the size of a leech. I gave it to her brandishing a new Italian penknife. Look, I said turning, and blood spat onto her shirt. My wife has scars like spread raindrops on knees and ankles, she talks of broken greenhouse panes and yet, apart from imagining red feet, (a nymph out of Chagall) I bring little to that scene. We remember the time around scars, they freeze irrelevant emotions and divide us from present friends. I remember this girl’s face, the widening rise of surprise. And would she moving with lover or husband conceal or flaunt it, or keep it at her wrist a mysterious watch. And this scar I then remember is a medallion of no emotion. I would meet you now and I would wish this scar to have been given with all the love that never occurred between us.

To Love Someone Long-Term Is to Attend a Thousand Funerals of the People They Used to Be - Heidi Priebe

The people they’re too exhausted to be any longer. The people they don’t recognize inside themselves anymore. The people they grew out of, the people they never ended up growing into. We so badly want the people we love to get their spark back when it burns out; to become speedily found when they are lost. But it is not our job to hold anyone accountable to the people they used to be. It is our job to travel with them between each version and to honor what emerges along the way. Sometimes it will be an even more luminescent flame. Sometimes it will be a flicker that disappears and temporarily floods the room with a perfect and necessary darkness. Source: (https://allyourprettywords.tumblr.com/)