How close apocalypse feels touching this stone.

I’d never seen one before, but she wears the points translucently, her real one almost comical against the square cardboard cut-outs covered with gold glitter, an Instagram

The thing was misbehaving;             it raged with stale, smoky breath. sidewalk’s upward slope just outside my bedroom window.

I lit a candle for him, my wife trying to sleep on the couch

There is no end of them, it seems: these doors Within doors, propped open in their own good

You say little, but words swirl— no ahead and no behind, only you

An awakening, a tiny trickle of truth, like the crisp autumns somersaulting the sidewalk’s upward slope just outside my bedroom window.

A summer note from our Editor!

We barely knew, then, what it meant to venerate A life that shone ahead like a mid-day star;

Last night she heard her father coughing in the basement. She says that’s not unusual.

But after the cake batter bowl broke on the floor, and the moon outside the window glared at her like an otherworldly stalker, Auntie Samantha started to doubt everything,

Depth can simply mean the distance down. Considering the Sequoia, depth would include its roots.

Little one, hear your life in the slanting warble of the finch.

Sometimes, it is just a question of getting where we know the path will lead, but slowly.

A bee finds the lone flower in a field of weeds, a patch of sunlight slants its way into the deep forest and a cellist’s bow finds exactly the right note.

I presume to tax my unexcused absences. I hide in my hoodie. I miss game nights that bond people. I glob on crazy glue. I hand-write fluorescent encouragement and decorate tenderness with stickers.

We go on straining to hear above the lamentations celestial music, intent on rising above the burden of fatality and grief.

In the sins of my youth three patterns emerge

you will change every day –

Time splices our years together in quirky remix