Find and share the perfect poems.
How much pain
should we knowingly invite—
the gallery says all, and all at once.
Otherwise, why paint or write
if not for ends hidden in plain sight?
I watch you disappear
into the next room knowing,
one day, this room will be my life.
"Fireflies", "Memento Mori", "Trial of the Mayfly". Copyright © 2026 by Maya C. Popa. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
it is you who leaves. So I set out
to read for signs of imminence,
the same river twice stepped in.
Morning rises gently on the harbor;
our letters come disguised as life.
We know the score but fracture
on fact. We sign a dotted line
made out of promise—the pipes
You are never mentioned on Ararat
or elsewhere, but I know a woman’s hand
in salvation when I see it. Lately,
I’m torn between despair and ignorance.
I’m not a vegetarian, shop plastic,
use an air conditioner. Is this what happens
before it all goes fluvial? Do the selfish
Legions those summers of your childhood,
windshields thick with silhouettes on road trips
past clay counties toward the English coast.
The new air is empty, and who knew
we’d miss even what afflicted us? We knew,
and paid the price for June’s green candles
in bites pulsing under ice cubes, gambled