In 1992, I saw a boy chained to a loom / in the back room of a shop outside New Delhi. / His iron manacles were in reality / an undiscovered economic field.

—Cindy Ellen Hill

I have mastered the art of sowing stars in the sky,

which was previously my mother's interior speciality;

upon her sad and sudden ascension to the seventh sky

—Jonathan Chibuike Ukah

Vile draught

descends

to the viscera,

through its dark

corridors,

a dense

and viscous

flow,

—Robert René Galván

Have you ever grieved,

or even thought,

of the deaths

of uncounted millions

—Duane Herrmann

The day unrolls itself around the fabric

of life—frayed rolls of cloth untouched

since birth. Drive west on the freeway toward

the ocean, unwrap yourself like a mummy.

—José Chávez

You will be the amber and green lights tonight

the night before Mother’s Day,

the show in the anthracite sky

—Susan Cossette

I’m apologizing for killing

the head-banging fly who can’t

press for clemency. The myth

—C. John Graham

Oy after we played woof shadow puppets

in a dark-as-can-get-it bedroom

—Gerard Sarnat

You tell me / that the key / to the universe

resides in E. / To Einstein / it was simple

a point from which / the universe arises

its final catafalque.

—Louis Faber