The eerie drama
of moon and earth and cloud:
an eclipsed orb slipping
from penumbra to umbra
to penumbra, reappearing
newly created, from earth’s shadow,
to sail its lonely journey —
golden, remote, mysterious;
a link with the infinite universe.

I too will slip
from penumbra to umbra, but
while the moon navigates the millenia
for me there will be no return.

--Anne Ranasinghe

for my friend, Keith Gates

Sweet singing shepherd boy, why have you ceased
To make your songs, and who now tends your sheep?
Have you run off to fields more bright and blest
And left us here to weep?

We wished more time to hear your psalms.
They set so sweet upon our hearts.
Honey of hope and sorrow’s balms,
Those were the measures of your arts.

Our singing boy, he now has fled
The fields of grass and flesh to tend
His flocks where pains are shed
And music will not end.

--John Wood

I.M. Susan De Sola

I had to mute my phone and cover the screen
to keep your texts from waking me at night.
Something evil, something you’d almost seen
had breached your dining room and lay in wait —
a waking dream, you said. But it was real,
a malignant presence. And it wanted you.
You wouldn’t go downstairs to get your pills
but sent your husband for them. He said no.
Said it was nonsense. Said it was in your head. 
Said you knew better — and of course you did.
The tests were negative. The scans were clear.
Metastasis was possible, but rare. 
You almost knew it was in your clever brain.
The minute you turned to face it, you were gone.

--Marcia Menter

Tonight a moment unfolds like a word
no one has spoken in years.

Someone writes someone's name,
not desire but the idea

of desire taking shape in her mind.
When she puts pen to paper

she touches the skin of a new language.
What is left unsaid opens

huge wings and waits. The way
across a crowded room

a stranger might offer a drink
and we remember thirst,

a door, a window opening in a city
we haven't thought about in years

and beyond it, the thin,
bright air of possibility.

Desire is a stone that opens,
the lovesick heart of every story

ever written. Something
in the way his voice flies out

of his chest, the moment
landing on her shoulder

like a bird. And hope,
that long migration.

--Silvia Curbelo

The body is a stone house          the body
pins you to the ground
crowded with loss         empty
with longing     the weight
of the world falling through it
the way a body falls
fast asleep then suddenly awake
deliberate
in the way it sees you
The body anchored in sleep       suddenly
Lifted   suddenly unfurled
a crawlspace for wind    and rain
falling on a simple
city street          the clean map
of your childhood with its hundred
roads back to the leaky house     the room
where you first opened
your eyes saying           This is the place
You are the one             until I felt
my hands wash over you            and the glass
of my desire break and spill       water
we could sink through

--Silvia Curbelo

Ghost of bird flying over.
Ghost of solitude, of a line being cast.
Ghost of the last furtive embrace
and piano notes drifting out of the
windows
of the Hotel del Lago.
Ghost of the wineglass.
Ghost of unread letters,
and the violin with its entourage of
sadness,
Saturday night with nowhere else to go.
Ghost of the red dress pitched across a
chair,
and the blue raincoat with its torn silk
lining,
pockets full of sheet music
and postcards from the front lines.
Ghost of the warehouses and train
stations
and black coffee in all night restaurants.
Ghost of the next to last cigarette,
Carlos Gardel smoking under an awning
in the black and white rain
with night fading behind him.
Ghost of my father.
Ghost of writing this down.

--Silvia Curbelo

Some dreams are like glass
or a light beneath the surface of the water.

A girl weeps in a garden.
A woman turns her head and that is all.

We wake up a hundred times and
don’t know where we are. Asleep

at the wheel. Saved by
the luck of angels.

Everyone touching his lips
to something larger, the watermark

of some great sorrow. Everyone
giving himself away. The way

the rose gives up the stem and
floats completely, without history.

In the end every road leads
to water. What is left of a garden

is the dream, an alphabet of longing.
The shadow of the girl. Perfume.

--Silvia Curbelo

In every half-filled glass a river
begging to be named, rain on a leaf,
a snowdrift. What we long for

precedes us. What we've lost
trails behind, casting
a long shadow. Tonight

the music's sad, one man's
outrageous loneliness detonated
into arpeggios of relief. The way

someone once cupped someone's
face in their hands, and the world
that comes after. Everything

can be pared down to gravity
or need. If the soul soars with longing
the heart plunges headfirst

into what's left, believing
there's a pure want
to fall through. What we drink to

in the end is loss, the space
around it, the opposite
of thirst, its shadow.

--Silvia Curbelo

In a room not unlike this one
someone is always leaving someone else.

Someone blows out a candle.
Someone has finished the wine.

The single glove laid open
on the windowsill tells only

half the story. Try to imagine
the hundred metaphors for flight,

for endings, a door finally closing
and what is left behind—

the robe with its torn lining,
a scarf, cufflinks, an old shoe.

A man’s abandoned overcoat
brings to mind

trains stations, suitcases,
footsteps vanishing down the hall.

There is no mistaking
the closet door left ajar,

the empty hangers
like the thin shoulders

of loss, of distance.
If you have loved

someone like that
you have imagined his hands

opening other doors, unbuttoning
his shirt in other rooms.

Even as the buttons fall away
there is no turning back.

A dropped shoe is an island.
A scarf will break your heart.

--Silvia Curbelo

I could lie down in all that blue.
I'm watching shadows tell
their own story, a pasture
that sleeps through anything.
The voice is a meadow, the river
is a wing. I wanted
to be there so completely
I thought this poem was you asleep,
your quiet breathing.
The heart is an odd museum.
Sadnesses display themselves
in corners, in rooms
as empty as this field.
The hand denies the face,
the past lingers.
I let my voice climb out
of my cold shoes. It talks
to air, it conjures
what it needs, a landscape
without blame, a room
the color of a whisper.
When I think about love crawling
through this world exhausted
with no place left to fall
I could run circles around
the word. I could say it
to anyone. Listen. Somebody
dreamed this.

--Silvia Curbelo

The room was a pond with one wave
in it. Words floated to the ceiling
of your voice. The way
you put your hand there
and there, a kind of swimming
out of reason, or loneliness.
I imagined the face behind my face
was more beautiful, an elusive
and more difficult image of myself.
Holding my breath like a child I waited
for storm clouds to pass, for an old
silence gathering behind trees.
Each word cracked open its black shell.
I stared past the moment, past the room,
Past the half-open flower of your voice
looking for something solid
to weigh us clown, but that could be
torn open, bread or language.
A name spoken in darkness
or a wave: these are words to live by.
I touched you to ease a silence in myself.
Sleepwalking through iridescent skin
the trick is to not quite remember.
The way the hand rocked
by a sudden current lets go
of the branch. The slow drift
out of the center
and the long swim back.

--Silvia Curbelo

for Lindsey Bower

Every day, I magic myself alive again
from the near death experience of trauma.
I swallow my heart back from
the lump it has become in my throat.
I taste my own memories
without the flavour of blood but as poetry.
I learn how to whisper my name
without it sounding like a curse.
I murmur spells to the parts of me
others have found too dangerous to love.
And after this morning ritual
I finally smile at the woman in my mirror.
Tell me again,
how healing is not a magical thing.
Tell me again,
how I am not made of sorcery.

--Nikita Gill

for Lara Connally

Before she became fire, she was water.
Quenching the thirst of every dying creature.
She gave and she gave
until she turned from sea to desert.
But instead of dying of the heat,
the sadness, the heartache,
she took all of her pain
and from her own ashes became fire.

--Nikita Gill

for Emily Lancon

One day when you wake up, you will find that you
have become a forest. You have grown roots and
found strength in them that no one thought you
had. You have become stronger and more beautiful,
full of life giving qualities. You have learned to take
all the negativity around you and turn it into
oxygen for easy breathing. A host of wild creatures
live inside you and you call them stories. A variety
of beautiful birds rest inside your mind and you call
them memories. You have become an incredible self
sustaining thing of epic proportions. And you
should be so proud of yourself, of how far you have
come from the seeds of who you used to be.

--Nikita Gill