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Radium, by Louise Glück When summer ended, my sister was going to school. No more staying at home with the dogs, waiting to catch up. No more playing house with my mother. She was growing up, she could join the carpool.

No one wanted to stay home. Real life was the world: you discovered radium, you danced the swan queen. Nothing

explained my mother. Nothing explained putting aside radium because you realized finally it was more interesting to make beds, to have children like my sister and me.

My sister watched the trees; the leaves couldn't turn fast enough. She kept asking was it fall, was it cold enough?

But it was still summer. I lay in bed, listening to my sister breathe. I could see her blond hair in the moonlight; under the white sheet, her little elf's body. And on the bureau, I could see my new notebook. It was like my brain: clean, empty. In six months what was written there would be in my head also.

I watched my sister's face, one side buried in her stuffed bear. She was being stored in my head, as memory, like facts in a book.

I didn't want to sleep. I never wanted to sleep these days. Then I didn't want to wake up. I didn't want the leaves turning, the nights turning dark early. I didn't want to love my new clothes, my notebook. I knew what they were: a bribe, a distraction. Like the excitement of school: the truth was time was moving in one direction, like a wave lifting the whole house, the whole village.

I turned the light on, to wake my sister. I wanted my parents awake and vigilant; I wanted them to stop lying. But nobody woke. I sat up reading my Greek myths in the nightlight.

The nights were cold, the leaves fell. My sister was tired of school, she missed being home. But it was too late to go back, too late to stop. Summer was gone, the nights were dark. The dogs wore sweaters to go outside.

And then fall was gone, the year was gone. We were changing, we were growing up. But it wasn't something you decided to do; it was something that happened, something you couldn't control.

Time was passing. Time was carrying us faster and faster toward the door of the laboratory, and then beyond the door into the abyss, the darkness. My mother stirred the soup. The onions, by a miracle, became part of the potatoes.

You can't have it all, by Emily Levine

But you can have the fig tree and its fat leaves like clown hands gloved with green. You can have the touch of a single eleven-year-old finger on your cheek, waking you at one a.m. to say the hamster is back. You can have the purr of the cat and the soulful look of the black dog, the look that says, If I could I would bite every sorrow until it fled, and when it is August, you can have it August and abundantly so. You can have love, though often it will be mysterious, like the white foam that bubbles up at the top of the bean pot over the red kidneys until you realize foam’s twin is blood. You can have the skin at the center between a man’s legs, so solid, so doll-like. You can have the life of the mind, glowing occasionally in priestly vestments, never admitting pettiness, never stooping to bribe the sullen guard who’ll tell you all roads narrow at the border. You can speak a foreign language, sometimes, and it can mean something. You can visit the marker on the grave where your father wept openly. You can’t bring back the dead, but you can have the words forgive and forget hold hands as if they meant to spend a lifetime together. And you can be grateful for makeup, the way it kisses your face, half spice, half amnesia, grateful for Mozart, his many notes racing one another towards joy, for towels sucking up the drops on your clean skin, and for deeper thirsts, for passion fruit, for saliva. You can have the dream, the dream of Egypt, the horses of Egypt and you riding in the hot sand. You can have your grandfather sitting on the side of your bed, at least for a while, you can have clouds and letters, the leaping of distances, and Indian food with yellow sauce like sunrise. You can’t count on grace to pick you out of a crowd but here is your friend to teach you how to high jump, how to throw yourself over the bar, backwards, until you learn about love, about sweet surrender, and here are periwinkles, buses that kneel, farms in the mind as real as Africa. And when adulthood fails you, you can still summon the memory of the black swan on the pond of your childhood, the rye bread with peanut butter and bananas your grandmother gave you while the rest of the family slept. There is the voice you can still summon at will, like your mother’s, it will always whisper, you can’t have it all, but there is this.

Eating the Avocado, by Carrie Fountain Now I know that I’ve never described anything, not one single thing, not the flesh of the avocado which darkens so quickly, though if you scrape what’s been exposed to the air it’s new-green beneath like nothing ever happened. I want to describe this evening, though it’s not spectacular. The baby babbling in the other room over the din and whistle of a football game, and now the dog just outside the door, scratching, rattling the tags on her collar, the car going by, far away but loud, a car without a muffler, and the sound of the baby returning again, pleasure and weight. I want to describe the baby. I want to describe the baby for many hours to anyone who wishes to hear me. My feelings for her take me so far inside myself I can see the pure holiness in motherhood, and it makes me burn with success and fear, the hole her coming has left open, widening. Last night we fed her some of the avocado I’ve just finished eating while writing this poem. Her first food. I thought my heart might burst, knowing she would no longer be made entirely of me, flesh of my flesh. Startled in her amusing way by the idea of eating, she tried to take it in, but her mouth pushed it out. And my heart did burst.

Archaic Torso of Apollo, by Rainer Maria Rilke We cannot know his legendary head with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso is still suffused with brilliance from inside, like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could a smile run through the placid hips and thighs to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself, burst like a star: for here there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life.

There those who water the seed of light that no one sees. They are visionaries. And those who hold others, feeling the power of what they can become. They are teachers. And those who care enough to love the truth of what-is until Heaven is revealed here on Earth. They are sages. Few are celebrities. Few are rich. The best are often silent, deflecting attention, bowing to the gift. This is for them and their lineage and the hope that we can do this for each other. — Mark Nepo, Epigraph of the book 'Drinking from the river of light: The Life of Expression'

Even if, from the sky, poison befalls all, I am still sweetness wrapped in sweetness wrapped in sweetness.

Rumi

'The doors to the world of the wild self are few but precious. If you have a deep scar, that is a door, if you have an old old story, that is a door, if you love the sky and the water so much you almost cannot bear it, that is a door. If you yearn for a deeper life, a full life, a sane life, that is a door.' Clarissa Pinkola Estés