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"Salvage" by Hedgie Choi

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From Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson

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"August" by Dorothy Parker

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Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson // Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn // Musica Humana by Ilya Kaminsky // Basic August by Eileen Myles // Imitations of Drowning by Anne Sexton // Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? by Raymond Carver // The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner // Atmospheric Embroidery by Meena Alexander // The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath by Sylvia Plath // The Women by Kim Addonizio // 

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Childhood does not end in one fell swoop, as we wished it would when we were children. It lingers, crouching silently in our adult, then wizened bodies, until one day, many years later, when we think that the heavy burden of bitterness and despair we've been shouldering has turned us irredeemably into adults, it reappears with the force and speed of a lightning bolt, wounding us with its freshness, its innocence, its unerring dose of naivety, but most all with the certainty that this really and truly is the last glimpse we shall have of it.

Guadalupe Nettel, from The Accidentals (tr. Rosalind Harvey)

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On Walking Backwards

by Anne Carson

My mother forbade us to walk backwards. That is how the dead walk, she would say. Where did she get this idea? Perhaps from a bad translation. The dead after all, do not walk backwards but they do walk behind us. They have no lungs and cannot call out but would love for us to turn around. They are victims of love, many of them.

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"Lies About Sea Creatures" by Ada Limón

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From "Before" by Ada Limón

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From "July 13, 2013" by Andrea Gibson

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Excerpt from "Angels Of The Get-Through" by Andrea Gibson

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Leaving Home by Ali Shapiro

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Richard Siken

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Virginia Woolf, from her novel titled "The Waves," featured in The Complete Works of Virginia Woolf

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From Endless Summer by Nate Pritts

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June

by Alex Dimitrov

There will never be more of summer than there is now. Walking alone through Union Square I am carrying flowers and the first rosé to a party where I’m expected. It’s Sunday and the trains run on time but today death feels so far, it’s impossible to go underground. I would like to say something to everyone I see (an entire city) but I’m unsure what it is yet. Each time I leave my apartment there’s at least one person crying, reading, or shouting after a stranger anywhere along my commute. It’s possible to be happy alone, I say out loud and to no one so it’s obvious, and now here in the middle of this poem. Rarely have I felt more charmed than on Ninth Street, watching a woman stop in the middle of the sidewalk to pull up her hair like it’s an emergency — and it is. People do know they’re alive. They hardly know what to do with themselves. I almost want to invite her with me but I’ve passed and yes it’d be crazy like trying to be a poet, trying to be anyone here. How do you continue to love New York, my friend who left for California asks me. It’s awful in the summer and winter, and spring and fall last maybe two weeks. This is true. It’s all true, of course, like my preference for difficult men which I had until recently because at last, for one summer the only difficulty I’m willing to imagine is walking through this first humid day with my hands full, not at all peaceful but entirely possible and real.

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richard siken

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There's Always This Year by Hanif Abdurraqib