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I Can Usually Beat the Bus Home by Keri Smith
biking from work Sunday night
since they have repaved Myrtle Avenue
while my friend has been dead for two weeks
I pass by the park full of couples
and retired men sitting alone
and I call out to children crossing the street
please be careful, I want to say
please make it home safely, aren’t they beautiful
and my friend has been dead for two weeks
yet everyone has done their job
the busses continue their cross-Brooklyn routes
and I worked through another weekend
I missed the blood moon and the eclipse
and I missed the thunderstorms and the day at the beach
the summer has continued
without my friend, -
“Danger” with Artwork by Sally Doyle
Underneath this room is danger. You can feel it when you walk across thefloor. This evening you feel it as you sit in your small chair reading. But stillyou cannot name it. The other members of your family who are staring attheir phones don’t appear to be concerned at all. You stop reading to listen,and rumination turns into trance. Right at the moment when you are thinking,“Someone has been abandoned,” a woman wearing a surgical mask enters theroom. -
“A Stranger Named Plague” by Stephanie Dickinson
Above: “Three Horses Tended by Men” by Umberto Boccioni
Stone Pavement1981, Houston
&
You _arrive_in the _time of _azaleas _and heat wave. _Hungry_ for the
high _yellow _of _a _Gulf _Coast _scorcher,_ you _eat on _Texas _Street
where oil _drum _cookers, -
Three Poems by Peter Spagnuolo
Above: “The Repast of the Lion” by Henri Rousseau
Cartographer
The monkeys scold that I lost my way, I’ve gone
mad on the march through you, a hand on the whip—
your impenetrable wild I leave undone,
and tame your jungle waste—but wrecked my ship,
so I must spread you open, with no way back.
My rivals tell I’ve grown too old to play
the boy explorer, yet at that perfumed crack
where wells a secret font of youth, I lay
with my discovery, -
Address to The New School Graduating 2020 Class from Lara Love Hardin
Lara Love Hardin will be giving this speech on LIVE with LIT as a part of LIT’s Commencement 2020 this Tuesday, May 19th at 7pm. Join here.
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I have trouble walking through doorways. I never get it right, I’m close, but always seem to catch a shoulder, a forearm, a hip on the frame. I forget that I am someone who never quite gets it right, until I find the mysterious bruises on my body and remember. As a child I used to walk down a city block and then abruptly make a right turn and walk into the wall of a building.
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Address to The New School Graduating 2020 Class from Rachel B. Neumann (TNS ’01)
Rachel B. Neumann will read and discuss her speech on LIVE with LIT as a part of LIT’s Commencement 2020 this Tuesday, May 19th at 7pm. Join here.
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Dear Writers,
If, when I call you “writers” you don’t wince or duck your head or look behind you to see who I am talking to, then congratulations, you are cooked enough and ready to go out in the world. Only one other thing is required of you now and — unlike in some vocations, where it takes some work to figure out what to do —as a writer,
