• Tomorrow

    D. Nurkse

    Summer 2020

    Can you make it to tomorrow? Can you hold out?

    There you will find what lies beyond the pines, what the porch lamp hides, who waits at the top of the chipped stone steps.

    Your father and mother will be circling in the green skiff, far out in the reach. He sculling with one oar, she scanning the glare, eyes shielded. She points, she mouths a name, you break the wave, gasping. Such a delicate operation. She has to lean forward to embrace you, he must slouch back at the same moment, equalizing the thrust, then right himself in increments, while you wriggle over the gunwale.

    All the more difficult as they’ve been arguing, in whispers or in mime, exquisitely aware how sound travels over water. If one performs perfectly, it might seem like an attempt to make amends.

    D. Nurkse’s latest book is A Country of Strangers, a collection of new and selected poems from Knopf.

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    Naples, Florida

    Ange Mlinko

    National Weather Service Warnings
    interrupted Opus 3, number 2
    on the drive back from the store.
    From our grotta smeralda (Green Cove Springs)
    to our grotta azzurra (same, but Blue)
    a band of thunderstorms set the score
    with straight-line winds and pizzicato strings.

    Galway Aria

    Sharon Olds

    At the end of the day, at the end of the evening,
    in full night, I finally turn out
    the light and go to one of your dormer
    windows—the eaves pulled down, over
    my shoulders, as if I am out over
    the hollyhocks and the barrel of nasturtiums, the
    flowers with their divinity in their
    throats to be sucked out, the deep
    panes set into the roof, the house set
    halfway up the hill on top of the
    mountain over the valley.

    Late Migrations

    Margaret Renkl

    This life thrives on death. But hold very, very still in the springtime sun, and a tufted titmouse will come to harvest your hair and spin it into a soft, warm place for her young. Keep an eye on the ivy climbing the side of the house, and one day you will see a pair of finches coaxing their babies from a tiny nest balanced among the leaves. Hear the bluebirds calling from the trees, and you might turn in time to see a fledgling peer from the hole in the dark nest box, gape at the bright wide world for the very first time, and then trust itself to the sky. Wait at the window on the proper day, and the cottontail nest hidden under the rosemary bush will open before you, spilling forth little rabbits who lift the leaves from last fall and push aside their mother’s fur and raise their ears and wrinkle their noses and bend for their first taste of the bitter dandelion. And it will be exactly what they wanted. 

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