I don’t actually read the page. I read the words, “Why do you waste your time doing that?” Because it’s fun and I love it. That’s why.

the light moving at its own speed

I wear black turtlenecks. Black panties. My lunch—mustard. Straight from the packet. No one sits next to me. Keep working my skills.

…what did I know of love’s austere and lonely offices?

inside the perfect closeness

A celebration of minor, automatic graciousness within a community, which can shine a penetrating light.

Look as long as you can at the friend you love, no matter whether that friend is moving away from you or coming back toward you.

and the moon is a spider tracking its white mud across the sky. We take Rome with us to Rome.

All can be measured by the standard of the capybara.

ISSUE SIX features fiction by Christopher Higgs, Jennifer Kronovet, Kyle Minor, Mark Jude Poirier, and Maura Stanton; creative nonfiction by Priscilla Becker, Jehanne Dubrow, and Emily O’Neill; film writing by J.M. Tyree; poetry by Diannely Antigua, Sandra Beasley, Molly Bendall, Jericho Brown, Heat

for a love that would hurt in a way she could translate into forever.

It colors the space blue because now it can.

still spinning its one syllable

and my heart— you can't plan on the heart, but the better part of it, my poetry, is open.

as if  I were reading to a match that had to last my life.

something else entirely going on but no single person can ever know it, so we fall in love. warm with trust

Poems "Tell me about last night" and "Thirteen years and this is what you are to me now" by Augury Books founding editor Kate Angus.

You can tell that the poet misses his pet, misses this unique relationship in his life that—itself like a star—helped orient him on certain too-quiet nights when he was lost at sea. It is a marvelous demonstration of how to write about animals: by using specific memories, and not anthropomorphizing them to such a degree that they lose their essential dogginess or catness or mongooseness, but, instead, by recognizing their striking, sometimes sublime differences from us, alongside their similarities. ​ Sometimes, it is enough, as Neruda understood, to have someone look at us to remind us we exist, and that someone, or something, cares that we do. ​ listening with drooping eyes and the occasional blustery sneeze.) He was wonderfully just-there, an uncritical receptacle for my childhood loneliness.

I think the sirens in The Odyssey sang The Odyssey, for there is nothing more seductive, more terrible, than the story of our own life, the one we do not want to hear and will do anything to listen to.

the horses running until they forget that they are horses.

Useless to think you’ll park and capture it More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there, As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.

and isn’t not knowing the rules just beautiful? When the sun echoes off the thousands of windshields

i let summer take over the house for however long it needs --- making their way from meal to meal across the sky --- it’s not quite true that every car should stop while a poem is in operation but try to tell me it wouldn’t be nice

when the evening is spread out against the sky ​ Poetry is language at its best. ​ You have a book open on your lap but you’re not reading it.

Lately I’ve had to call on words for little shots of strength. Some use tequila; I use poems short enough to memorize. Their lines float around in my head, counteracting the insidious words t…

It was as if the news of his cancer’s progression opened something inside of him so that he could clearly see into another world, another place he was on his way to. Whatever it was he saw endowed him with an overwhelming generosity of spirit and the most intense humanity I had ever witnessed. I don’t mean he wandered around performing good deeds; it was something more internal. He was overtaken by something like joy. Not a giggling and hysterical one, but a calming joy that infected every room he entered. ​ When you know somebody with less than six months to live and that person agrees to spend any moment of it with you at all, the immensity of that generosity does change you, undeniably. ​ —or, as my coworker, Jeff, used to say before he left the job and moved to California to be a social worker: Khalil is crackers, an arrival straight from the cracker factory. Why would the world endow this young boy with such wackiness, with the young Johnny Cash’s lopsided gait and pool-ball eyes, with the right amount of kindness to soothe the youngest children in the room and the right amount of self-assurance not to be intimidated by the presence of the older children, if he were not meant to live? I know that Khalil will be famous one day—a rock star, a basketball hero, a politician who will become the first Arab American President of the United States because he is so beautiful, and he knows suffering, and he will be cured, and I know for sure: he will live long enough to enter a presidential election, he will live long past thirty-five. ​ Some kids arrive in class sailing down the hallway on their IV poles ​ He never laughs anymore, and I thought I’d never hear him laughing again,” she said, and she was crying. ​ We enjoy ourselves in Writers’. ​ I helped him write—a loose hug that lasted at least the length of a single poem, but often, towards the end of his life, a hug that lasted the entire class.

And as he stares into the sky, there are twice as many stars as usual.

marriage is two people in love standing in the same bathroom

but rest And patiently learn to receive the self You have forsaken in the race of days. ​ To all the small miracles you rushed through. ​ Learn to linger around someone of ease

Last weekend I had a wonderful trip to my friend’s hermitage in remote Vermont. He lives there as a buddhist monk. I had a chance to recharge, walk through the snowy fields and drink tea with him. His official monk name is Brother Phap Man. Every evening of the few days I spent there, he […]