At Last the Secret is Out - W. H. Auden

At last the secret is out,

as it always must come in the end,

the delicious story is ripe to tell

to tell to the intimate friend;

over the tea-cups and into the square

the tongue has its desire;

still waters run deep, my dear,

there’s never smoke without fire.

Behind the corpse in the reservoir,

behind the ghost on the links,

behind the lady who dances

and the man who madly drinks,

under the look of fatigue

the attack of migraine and the sigh

there is always another story,

there is more than meets the eye.

For the clear voice suddenly singing,

high up in the convent wall,

the scent of the elder bushes,

the sporting prints in the hall,

the croquet matches in summer,

the handshake, the cough, the kiss,

there is always a wicked secret,

a private reason for this.

Healing Hermann Hesse - Buddy Wakefield

Hermann wants to eat nicotine sometimes. He asks

for a lot. He paces space to make himself nervous

because some people are better at surviving than

living. If you wanna get heavy he'll teach you. He

knows it. Spends his time falling from the weight.

Got a lead brain. It's a battle magnet. He carries it

around by the guilt straps. Don't laugh. You didn’t

see the size of the blizzard that birthed him. Fits

of snow. Cotton rocks. Whipped white bullet stretches

pinned with chips of teeth to his habit of crying for help.

He doesn't land well. Hates landing. It reminds him of not

living up.

Listen.

I know there were days you wanted to die.

Days you misplaced all the right words then waited

to make sense once everyone here stopped watching.

Nights you let them beat up your body in bed

because redemption was still alive in you howling.

Uncompromising.

Gathering strength.

Happiness

is too far to fall.

Felt like ecstasy

when they pounded it out of you.

Those days of dead weather high strung out together

and spoke for you.

You told everyone here it was a good life,

smiled and waved back into the wails of your wind fight,

into the parts of the past that haunt you,

all the days you weren’t being yourself.

It’s why most of the past

still haunts you,

Milk Worder,

Mr. Self Murder.

Hiding is not an option for people

so good at showing up. You show up.

It is okay that you showed up missing.

We’ve all abused ourselves

then looked over

the wrong shoulder about it.

Call it Fatherlock.

You were picked like this.

I know you hate the hope.

It’s all the hope that makes you stay.

And you stay so far off the ground.

Hermann will not bow down to gravity. Falling

he catches up to himself midair just before the ground

smacks. Pullthroat, they call’im. Sharp turner. Nothing

touches the ground here.  Ground is at capacity.

He sees that. He falls back. He patches parachutes

together with a kite knife.  It's big enough to raise him

in the updrafts where he hides himself away in angles

of air outlined by his knack for believing that this life

is gonna work itself out.

On Being Captain of Philadelphia's Top Ranked 1996 Academic Decathlon Team - Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz

We had a problem with Talisha.

She was known for being a bad highlighter.

She would highlight everything.

She told us she highlighted only

what she felt was important but it seems

she felt everything was important.

The academic team would sit around and

have conversations about how to address

Talisha’s highlighting problem.

Do we keep her away from team materials?

Do we have an intervention? Someone suggested

giving her two differently colored highlighters,

in an attempt to teach her the difference

between selective highlighting and a free-for all.

Turns out, two highlighters made her problems

worse. We were finally forced to agree

that we’d all just have to accept Talisha’s

highlighting issues, because we needed her.

She was our regional Teen Jeopardy champion,

and was the only one who knew anything about

Victorian Literature.

Sometimes, when I hear stories about other

people’s teen years, I feel like they are talking

about some exotic country,

one I know I’ll never visit: the slang they used,

the boys they kissed, the nights they snuck out,

the parents they’d upset,

all the things they had to worry about

and all the things that they never ever ever

had to worry about.

Depression, Too, Is a Kind of Fire - Taylor Mali

I’m an idiot because once

before we were married she asked me whether I knew

that we would not be having children

if we did get married, and I said yes.

And because she knew I was lying,

she asked if I was really okay with that.

And because I’m an idiot I said yes again.

And once during a fight, not married

more than two years, she said she felt like my first wife,

and I, like an idiot, assured her that she was.

She worked out at the gym five times a week

and smoked as many packs of ultra lights,

and I’m an idiot because when I asked her why,

She said, Because I hate myself and I want to die.

And I laughed and said something I don’t recall,

something completely and utterly insufficient.

From the roof of our apartment,

I saw 40 or 50 people jump from the towers

on a Tuesday morning—we used to be able to see them to the south,

just as, to the north, we can still see

(and by “we” I guess I mean now just me)

the Empire State Building,

which still steeps me in gratitude

because I’m an idiot—

out of the smoke with arms flailing.

And I swear I saw a perfect swan.

And I was going to write a poem

about how fire is the only thing

that can make a person jump out a window.

And maybe I’m an idiot for thinking I could have saved her—

call me her knight in shattered armor—

could have loved her more,

or told the truth about children.

But depression, too, is a kind of fire.

And I know nothing of either.

LENS - Andrea Gibson

I’ve been practicing gratitude.

I’ve been skipping entire weeks.

Practicing a wider lens. Listening

for the bully’s heartbeat

Hearing it in my own chest.

I’ve been remembering the time I cried

in a cloud of tear gas at a peaceful protest.

How I decided I was too soft to last,

and then I decided to be softer.

I’ve been remembering way way back

to the moment they told me Jesus walked on water.

How I knew whatever I’d grow up to believe

I would never try to wrestle a miracle

away from anyone’s reason to live.

I’ve been remembering how I wrestled a miracle

away from your reason to live.

If only shame could wash me clean,

but that is never how healing works.

Nobody ever won anything from anyone

thinking the whole world was out of their league.

I’m sorry you know

what I look like when no one is looking.

I don’t expect anyone to believe

in justice and forgiveness at the same time.

If it’s any consolation

I feel like a ferris wheel in a snowbank

twenty years after they shut down the park.

If it’s any consolation I’ve been living in my head

whenever anyone tells me I have a good heart.

And I think about you. I think about you. 

untitled 8 - Mira Gonzalez

it is 2:05 in the morning

your foot on the brake is preventing the car from drifting backwards

he is kissing you first deliberately

then in a lazy or confused way

you know he is trying to communicate something important

and maybe he has wanted you for a long time

but his tongue is moving around your mouth

you begin to wonder if he wants to kiss you

or if he wants to push his way through you

you can see his bedroom window from where you are standing

he is climbing over fences and unlocking them from the inside

he says ‘go up those stairs and turn right’

you swear that you would have loved him a year ago

and every day since then

you are waiting at the top of his stairs

you don’t know where to look or what to touch

you are thinking about the ‘check engine’ light in your car

you are aware of certain things while he has sex with you

helicopter noises through an open window

a bottle of blue cough syrup

street signs indicating the direction to an eastbound freeway

he is strong and gentle and you wish he was only one of those things

he is tracing his fingers across the edge of you

everything is quiet other than a barely audible sound

in the space between his arm and his shoulder

he says ‘why are you sighing so much’

you say ‘that is just how I breathe’

he says ‘you don’t want to be here’