The Thing Is BY ELLEN BASS

to love life, to love it even when you have no stomach for it and everything you’ve held dear crumbles like burnt paper in your hands, your throat filled with the silt of it. When grief sits with you, its tropical heat thickening the air, heavy as water more fit for gills than lungs; when grief weights you down like your own flesh only more of it, an obesity of grief, you think, How can a body withstand this? Then you hold life like a face between your palms, a plain face, no charming smile, no violet eyes, and you say, yes, I will take you I will love you, again. Poem copyright ©2002 Ellen Bass, "The Thing Is," from Poetry of Presence: An Anthology of Mindfulness Poems, (Grayson Books, 2017). Poem reprinted by permission of Ellen Bass and the publisher.

Secret of Life - Diana Der-Hovanessian

Once during the war on a bus going to Portsmouth a navy yard worker told me the secret of life. The secret of life, he said, can never be passed down one generation to the other. The secret of life, he said, is hunger. It makes an open hand. The secret of life is money. But only the small coins. The secret of life, he said, is love. You become what you lose. The secret of life, he said, is water. The world will end in flood. The secret of life, he said, is circumstance. If you catch the right bus at the right time you will sit next to the secret teller who will whisper it in your ear.

Antilamentation - Dorianne Laux

Regret nothing. Not the cruel novels you read to the end just to find out who killed the cook. Not the insipid movies that made you cry in the dark, in spite of your intelligence, your sophistication. Not the lover you left quivering in a hotel parking lot, the one you beat to the punchline, the door, or the one who left you in your red dress and shoes, the ones that crimped your toes, don’t regret those. Not the nights you called god names and cursed your mother, sunk like a dog in the living room couch, chewing your nails and crushed by loneliness. You were meant to inhale those smoky nights over a bottle of flat beer, to sweep stuck onion rings across the dirty restaurant floor, to wear the frayed coat with its loose buttons, its pockets full of struck matches. You’ve walked those streets a thousand times and still you end up here. Regret none of it, not one of the wasted days you wanted to know nothing, when the lights from the carnival rides were the only stars you believed in, loving them for their uselessness, not wanting to be saved. You’ve traveled this far on the back of every mistake, ridden in dark-eyed and morose but calm as a house after the TV set has been pitched out the upstairs window. Harmless as a broken ax. Emptied of expectation. Relax. Don’t bother remembering any of it. Let’s stop here, under the lit sign on the corner, and watch all the people walk by.

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.