The Word Plum by Helen Chasin The word plum is delicious pour and push, luxury of self-love, and savoring murmur full in the mouth and falling like fruit taut skin pierced, bitten, provoked into juice, and tart flesh question and reply, lip and tongue of pleasure. This poem appeared in the 1968 collection Coming Close and Other Poems, which was published as the winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets of that year. The series publishes a poet's first book and uses, of cou

I Go Back to May 1937 by Sharon Olds I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges, I see my father strolling out under the ochre sandstone arch, the    red tiles glinting like bent plates of blood behind his head, I see my mother with a few light books at her hip standing at the pillar made of tiny bricks, the wrought-iron gate still open behind her, its sword-tips aglow in the May air, they are about to graduate, they are about to get married,    they are kids,

Lighting Up in the Bomb Shelter by Celia Lawren We didn’t care that missiles in Cuba were aimed at our homes.  We were twelve-year-old girls running barefoot through wet summer grass in the dark, headed for a slumber party in the bomb shelter. Cinder block cavern carved into basement corner, walls lit up in buttercup yellow― a curious Cold War feng shui conceived for a home economics project by my sister, It was packed with Free World amenities:   central air and heat, r