I Don’t Want To Be The Owner Of Your Fantasy, I Just Want To Be A Part Of Your Family

Virginia Woolf, from To the Lighthouse

love poem beginning with a yellow cab by José Olivarez

- Oscar Wilde, 1895

missed time by Ha Jin

may to december by Megan Fernandes

ode to emptiness by Sally Wen Mao

Frida Kahlo to Marty McConnell

by Marty McConnell

leaving is not enough; you must stay gone. train your heart like a dog. change the locks even on the house he’s never visited. you lucky, lucky girl. you have an apartment just your size. a bathtub full of tea. a heart the size of Arizona, but not nearly so arid. don’t wish away your cracked past, your crooked toes, your problems are papier mache puppets you made or bought because the vendor at the market was so compelling you just had to have them. you had to have him. and you did. and now you pull down the bridge between your houses. you make him call before he visits. you take a lover for granted, you take a lover who looks at you like maybe you are magic. make the first bottle you consume in this place a relic. place it on whatever altar you fashion with a knife and five cranberries. don’t lose too much weight. stupid girls are always trying to disappear as revenge. and you are not stupid. you loved a man with more hands than a parade of beggars, and here you stand. heart like a four-poster bed. heart like a canvas. heart leaking something so strong they can smell it in the street.

Sometimes

by Mary Oliver

I.

Something came up out of the dark. It wasn’t anything I had ever seen before. It wasn’t an animal or a flower, unless it was both.

Something came up out of the water, a head the size of a cat but muddy and without ears. I don’t know what God is. I don’t know what death is.

But I believe they have between them some fervent and necessary arrangement.

II.

Sometimes melancholy leaves me breathless…

III.

Water from the heavens! Electricity from the source! Both of them mad to create something!

The lighting brighter than any flower. The thunder without a drowsy bone in its body.

IV.

Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.

V. Two or three times in my life I discovered love. Each time it seemed to solve everything. Each time it solved a great many things but not everything. Yet left me as grateful as if it had indeed, and thoroughly, solved everything.

VI.

God, rest in my heart and fortify me, take away my hunger for answers, let the hours play upon my body

like the hands of my beloved. Let the cathead appear again — the smallest of your mysteries, some wild cousin of my own blood probably — some cousin of my own wild blood probably, in the black dinner-bowl of the pond.

VII.

Death waits for me, I know it, around one corner or another. This doesn’t amuse me. Neither does it frighten me.

After the rain, I went back into the field of sunflowers. It was cool, and I was anything but drowsy. I walked slowly, and listened

to the crazy roots, in the drenched earth, laughing and growing.