Marie Howe - "Easter"

Two of the fingers on his right hand
had been broken

so when he poured back into that hand it surprised
him—it hurt him at first.

And the whole body was too small. Imagine
the sky trying to fit into a tunnel carved into a hill.

He came into it two ways:
From the outside, as we step into a pair of pants.

And from the center—suddenly all at once.
Then he felt himself awake in the dark alone.

- Marie Howe

Good Friday

“…And as ye go, preach, saying, The kingdom of heaven is at hand.
Heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast out devils;
freely ye have received, freely give…”

- from Matthew 10:7-8

James Wright - "The Journey"

Anghiari is medieval, a sleeve sloping down
A steep hill, suddenly sweeping out
To the edge of a cliff, and dwindling.
But far up the mountain, behind the town,
We too were swept out, out by the wind,
Alone with the Tuscan grass.

Wind had been blowing across the hills
For days, and everything now was graying gold
With dust, everything we saw, even
Some small children scampering along a road,
Twittering Italian to a small caged bird.

We sat beside them to rest in some brushwood,
And I leaned down to rinse the dust from my face.

I found the spider web there, whose hinges
Reeled heavily and crazily with the dust,
Whole mounds and cemeteries of it, sagging
And scattering shadows among shells and wings.
And then she stepped into the center of air
Slender and fastidious, the golden hair
Of daylight along her shoulders, she poised there,
While ruins crumbled on every side of her.
Free of the dust, as though a moment before
She had stepped inside the earth, to bathe herself.

I gazed, close to her, till at last she stepped
Away in her own good time.

Many men
Have searched all over Tuscany and never found
What I found there, the heart of the light
Itself shelled and leaved, balancing
On filaments themselves falling. The secret
Of this journey is to let the wind
Blow its dust all over your body,
To let it go on blowing, to step lightly, lightly
All the way through your ruins, and not to lose
Any sleep over the dead, who surely
Will bury their own, don't worry.

- James Wright

Genevieve Bujold as Anne Boleyn, in "Anne of the Thousand Days"

“For six years—this year, and this, and this, and this—I did not love him.
And then I did. Then I was his. I can count the days I was his in hundreds.

The days we bedded. Married. Were Happy. Bore Elizabeth.
Hated. Lusted. Bore a dead child... which condemned me...

In all one thousand days. Just a thousand. Strange.
And of those thousand, one when we were both in love,
only one, when our loves met and overlapped and were both mine and his.
And when I no longer hated him, he began to hate me.
Except for that one day.”

Hala Alyan - "Honeymoon"

Of this room remember heat. A fight with my father and
glass evil eyes. The television sparking like a glamorous fish.

We’ve turned off every lightbulb, fan each other with foreign
magazines. I take photographs of stray dogs. In the car,

the Turkish driver listens to horse races on the radio.
I won, he tells us. I dress like a pillar. I want to burn the verbs

I mispronounce to the Egyptian waiter. My uterus bleeds from Athens
to Istanbul and the moon is a spider tracking its white mud

across the sky. Orange blossoms open like pepper in the courtyard.
Everywhere, blue rooftops. Antibiotics for my infected jaw.

We take Rome with us to Rome. At the passport control line,
you tell me to let you speak. You tell them I’m with you.

- Hala Alyan

Brooks Haxton - "Essential Tremor"

The black and gold stitch
from the upper gill of a brook trout
to the middle ray of the tail fin,
you once told me, houses hair cells
sensitive to the flow of the stream.
And the rest…that dark green
swath on the flank,
the spots of ocher, stipples
blood red ringed with cornflower blue…
the whole thing shimmering
with the most delicate scales,
to the fisherman’s eye
is a revelation. You too,
after you led me down at dusk
into a stream so cold
it made my ankles hurt,
and after we caught one each,
just big enough to keep
and cook on a little fire we made
at the foot of the mountain
under the Dog Day stars, you too,
when you smiled, freckles by firelight
trembling on the back of your hand.