Each docked boat
is tattooed across its bow:

Cinnamon Girl, Hazel B,
Lady Lou, Miner’s Debt.

Low mountains
encircle the marina, the rock

And snow of each peak
patched like molting caribou.

VANESSA VILCHES NORAT
Last night, as I was waiting for him, I poked my head into the hole and saw a puddle. I hadn’t noticed it before. I decided to clean it up, so I took a broom to the stagnant water. Snails and moss had taken over the tunnel walls. A swarm of mosquitoes inhabited the pond.

I think it’s right to talk about it this way, that such stories keep a kind of territory, and you have to come into that territory to have them. They extend outward, too, beyond both place and time, the places and times such stories are made.

After the wind, a man named Chuck died lying on the ice next to the fuel pump at the Phillips 66 off I-80 on the east side of Rawlins, Wyoming.

Coming down the mountain from the McDonald Observatory under a hail of starshine and black night—the darkest sky in the lower 48 states—the universe went on expanding around us, my companion and me.

Stand here, traveler. You have come a long way. Beyond this fence, something happened.

JEFFREY HARRISON
you wrote when you sent me your haiku. / If only I could send this poem to you, / and you could pick it up at American Express / the way, in 1989, I picked up your letter / at their office near the Spanish Steps / a few doors from the house where Keats died.

PREETI VANGANI
With vignettes, I could plumb its narrative arc to become a force propelling the book forward. It also felt haunting yet warm that the mothers kept reappearing throughout the life of this grief. That repetition created a chorus of voices that angers and despairs, yet cradles the speaker.

ELIZABETH BRUS
Tonight, after the pump, Tsepiso wishes to watch The Bold and the Beautiful, her favorite American show. Her home sits at the edge of the maize fields, overlooking the village. Her mother sleeps in a round room with a thatch roof, but her own room is next door.

BRITTA STROMEYER
The narrative suggests that time doesn’t necessarily heal wounds but instead makes them less visible. I asked Poppy if this was her intention, and if she agreed with the statement, that time, while making old wounds less visible, creates new forms of emotional hurt and displacement.