I am bravery.
I am courage.
I am valor.
I am daring.
I am holding a thesaurus.

- Demitri Martin

You’re probably expecting something dramatic,
Something ecstatic, something traumatic
To cry out your tears until you can’t no more.
Thing is, my life’s kinda a bore:

I’m as normal as anyone could be,
I have good friends, and a good family,
With two legs, and I use them to stand,
Five fingers on each of my hands,

Want to hear about my life plans?
Of course you don’t.
That’s the curse of being happy:
No one knows a thing about me;

After hearing this, would you want to stay?
There’s more interesting people not so far away,
Broken kids you think you can fix,
And heroes you worship, add that to the mix;

And once you have this big, giant pit,
Where do all the normal people fit?
I know, I’m being ungrateful,
I don’t mean to sound so hateful;

It’s just, when everyone tells you you’re special,
what do you do when you’re not?
There’s a moment in your favorite book
Where the troubled girl takes a look

At me and wishes she had my life,
Free of troubles, free of strife,
Then she carries on and it never comes up again:
The normal girl gets forgotten

'Cause you’re not the main character, you’re the life she longed for
A what-if and nothing more,
Your fate was sealed long ago,
So know your place and keep your head low.

Next time you see a normal girl, don’t walk away;
Make her feel special for just one day,
Because we want our own stories, but try as we might,
Normal girls just don’t get the spotlight."

 - Adira Rose Koffsky - of blessed memory

THE BLUES by William Matthews

What did I think, a storm clutching a clarinet
and boarding a downtown bus, headed for lessons?
I had pieces to learn by heart, but at twelve

you think the heart and memory are different.
"'It's a poor sort of memory that only works
backwards,' the Queen remarked." Alice in Wonderland.

Although I knew the way music can fill a room,
even with loneliness, which is of course a kind
of company. I could swelter through an August

afternoon -- torpor rising from the river -- and listen
to Stan Getz and J. J. Johnson braid variations
on "My Funny Valentine" and feel there in the room

with me the force and weight of what I couldn't
say. What's an emotion anyhow?
Lassitude and sweat lay all about me

like a stubble field, it was so hot and listless,
but I was quick and furtive as a fox
who has his thirty-miles-a-day metabolism

to burn off as ordinary business.
I had about me, after all, the bare eloquence
of the becalmed, the plain speech of the leafless

tree. I had the cunning of my body and a few
bars -- they were enough -- of music. Looking back,
it almost seems as though I could remember --

but this can't be; how could I bear it? --
the future toward which I'd clatter
with that boy tied like a bell around my throat,

a brave man and a coward both,
to break and break my metronomic heart
and just enough to learn to love the blues.

(Discovered via Billy Collins reading it on his Facebook Live Show)

He ate and drank the precious words,
His spirit grew robust;
He knew no more that he was poor,
Nor that his frame was dust.
He danced along the dingy days,
And this bequest of wings
Was but a book. What liberty
A loosened spirit brings!

Emily D

On the Death of a Colleague

by Stephen Dunn

She taught theater, so we gathered
in the theater.
We praised her voice, her knowledge,
how good she was
with Godot and just four months later
with Gigi.
She was fifty. The problem in the liver.
Each of us recalled
an incident in which she'd been kind
or witty.
I told about being unable to speak
from my diaphragm
and how she made me lie down, placed her hand
where the failure was
and showed me how to breathe.
But afterwards
I only could do it when I lay down
and that became a joke
between us, and I told it as my offering
to the audience.
I was on stage and I heard myself
wishing to be impressive.
Someone else spoke of her cats
and no one spoke
of her face or the last few parties.
The fact was
I had avoided her for months.

It was a student's turn to speak, a sophomore,
one of her actors.
She was a drunk, he said, often came to class
reeking.
Sometimes he couldn't look at her, the blotches,
the awful puffiness.
And yet she was a great teacher,
he loved her,
but thought someone should say
what everyone knew
because she didn't die by accident.

Everyone was crying. Everyone was crying and it
was almost over now.
The remaining speaker, an historian, said he'd cut
his speech short.
And the Chairman stood up as if by habit,
said something about loss
and thanked us for coming. None of us moved
except some students
to the student who'd spoken, and then others
moved to him, across dividers,
down aisles, to his side of the stage.hh

Found Haiku by Yael Levine

הַשָּׂם נַפְשֵׁנוּ
בַּחַיִּים, וְלֹא נָתַן
לַמּוֹט רַגְלֵנוּ.
(תהילים סו, ט)

And Then

By Menachem Froman

(Translated By Neil Fleischmann)

Suddenly amidst the movement
you want to hold on to a fixed point
and just then in the middle of the confusion
you come to believe.
In the midst of the desolation
you find a fresh water spring
Amidst all this all of this.
You get up and say, "Thanks."