last swan song.

Aimee Seu, from "In Flux: 25"

Bianca Stone, from What Is Otherwise Infinite: Poems; “Mary Magdalene”

— Mahmoud Darwish, from “The Homeland: Between Memory and History,” Journal of an Ordinary Grief (Archipelago, 2010)

[ID of the poem "At Sunset" by Jason Shinder:

Your death must be loved this much.

You have to know the grief—now. / Standing by the water’s edge,

looking down at the wave

touching you. You have to lie, / stiff, arms folded, on a heap of earth

and see how far the darkness

will take you. I mean it, this, now— / before the ghost the cold leaves

in your breath, rises;

before the toes are put together / inside the shoes. There it is—the goddamn

orange-going-into-rose descending

circle of beauty and time. / You have nothing to be sad about.

END ID.]

— Emily Palermo, from Untitled

The World’s Loneliest Whale Sings the Loudest Song by Noor Hindi

Mary Oliver, from “Hum Hum”, A Thousand Mornings

[ Text ID: Some wounds never vanish. Yet little by little I learned to love my life. ]

Tawanda Mulalu, “All We Got Was Autumn. All We Got Was Winter.” in Please Make Me Pretty, I Don’t Want to Die

Boris Pasternak,  20th Century Russian Poetry: Silver and Steel, from ‘The Christmas Star’, tr. Yakov Hornstein

Jeanette Winterson, from Weight: The Myth of Atlas and Heracles

Obit, Victoria Chang

Manhattan is a Lenape Word, Natalie Diaz | Winter Without You, Sarah Kay 

[ Text ID: It is December and we must be brave. / It is December and nobody asked if I was ready. ] 

Mohammed El-Kurd, from Rifqa; "This Is Why We Dance"

— Pat Barker, Regeneration  

this is going to have me on my hands and knees dry heaving