By Robert Cording

If he were alive, he might have shrugged
and said, things happen for no reason,
but he wasn’t, he was only my son
in a dream, where he found me
sitting in the woods trying to understand
his death. The light looked
as if it were coming from below not above,
rising up out of the ground,
the way darkness first spools around
the trunks of trees and then climbs higher.
I was so happy to be speaking with him,
but, in the middle of what I was saying,
he disappeared. I kept sitting where I was,
as if he’d return again, but I knew
nothing else was going to happen.
When I woke, I had that feeling
I often have when getting into bed
of both dread and the possibility of relief.
I was still partly in the dream, and I felt
he was like a god, utterly removed,
and not knowable any longer.
Shaking, I sat up and tried to focus on
the larches outside feathering the wind,
and a sliver of moon that caught and released
a scrim of fast-moving clouds. I breathed in
the smell of the grass I’d mowed
that afternoon, then rolled toward my wife
whose skin was cool to my touch. Far off
in the woods, I heard the sense-startling
yips and bawls of a pack of coyotes.
All of it came to me in a wave of sensations
impossible to put into words and yet, oddly,
felt like a gift, something like an answer
to a question I could not remember asking him.

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By Robert Cording

I just wanted to sit, shut my eyes,
tilt my face to the sun, and try not to think,
but the koi, insistent, unappeasable,
crowded to my end, the water roiling
with their need, and, when I opened my eyes,
I saw them lift their bulbous heads,
making sounds with their rubbery, barbeled lips
as if they were gasping for air.
When I shut my eyes again
because I did not want to see, I saw
the little outdoor fireplace on my son’s deck,
embers still burning. The October day
had not yet come into being,
the light anomalous, something between
night and morning. Inside, on the floor
of his living room, my son was dead.

His wife had waited with his body
until my wife and I arrived.
We lay next to him, touched his hair,
his forehead, his cheeks, his lips and chin—
and then I heard myself
trying to tell him we were there, we were
with him, we loved him,
but my words were more like moans
than words, every word sounding
its helplessness. When I opened my eyes,
there were the koi, their too-small pond
swirling with color—white, yellow,
black and white, gold, red and white—
all of them entangled, straining against
each other, mouths agape, turning
and turning in their net of water.

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By David Gullette

I have spent years shying away from this poem
this poem in which I try to capture a single gesture of my father’s—

November 1967—a “berry aneurysm” has exploded in my brother’s skull
so I fly down to Raleigh and spend the night in the room
that became mine after our sister went off to college

Early next morning I hear the front door open
and go to the window
my father is leaving the house
I signal him to wait

We drive straight out Everett for the hospital
unspeaking
as we near Cameron Village the sun
peeks over the roof of Sears

And he takes his right hand off the wheel
and palm up lifts it toward the sun . . .

Even as I watch him I know there is more going on here than
“The world breaks our hearts and the indifferent sun simply
goes on doing what it has to”

More than
“So begins the first day without my younger son”

More than
“My older son is with me, together we bear witness to an iron law”

Dance is the art I know least
but I do love to watch a skilled dancer slowly revolve
and tilt his torso
and lift a hand to make a gesture toward the other dancer across the stage
and if you ask me to tell you what that hand is saying . . .

I was right to dread this poem

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By Ruth Baumann

I drive 45 minutes to send a man
five states away photos of a sunset
over an alligator-speckled wildlife refuge.
He is a bright possibility, & he breaks
the tired in me. We talk about how nice
it is to be so small. I stand & stare
into the high waters as they night-blacken,
think how beautiful it is to not struggle.
Occasionally there’s a vague splash, but nothing
clashes in the water. Nothing happens,
which might be a stand-in for everything
true happening, because as I start to drive home,
darkness folding like a loose tarp over the earth,
I do that thing where I think in love.

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By Amy Bagwell

when after thirty years my father
tells me not a day has gone by when
I have not thought of you I reply:  

        1. that’s a lot of nots.
        2. do you think this is a movie? do you think you’re the star?
        3. saying that is like wearing black to a funeral. it doesn’t prove anything.

& he might be speaking again
when I get in my car & back over
my phone on purpose & drive

to one of those nightmare stores
full of bright teeth & paperwork
& devices with new numbers that

fathers don’t have which is unfair
since it was me who called him
after thirty years which is the kicker

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By Tara Orzolek

Apparently there are dark forces that are trying to mess with the cosmos.
I learn that & I learn that a boy I slept with out of pity in college is about to become famous.
I try to not send anything bad through him via the cosmos like brain waves with spikes.
Like a shark attack or something traveling invisible through space-time directly to his well-being.
I try to be good this time.
I try to manage my accounts & wipe myself clean of spam & triple xxx junk.
I try to think good thoughts & procure good karma.
It will reign over me like a rainbow & I will strip naked to soak up all the good things
I get from these good thoughts.
Lower blood pressure & a spot in the afterlife etc.
But I strain to not let some bad molecules slip out & cause chaos.
Cause chaos for what?
Nothing really because he doesn’t remember me or does probably but doesn’t think about me.
The sex was mediocre & although inexperienced I knew it could be better than that.
That it could feel like a bed closing up on you.
Surrounding you from all sides & bulleting liquid pleasure into your brain.
A multicolored injection of happiness.
It was in a sleigh bed.
The ceiling was above the sleigh bed & it was peeling.
I could not see the cosmos from there.

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By Marcia LeBeau

I gave birth to two reluctant readers. Not that they won’t read or don’t like being read to, it’s just that books are a hard sell. From the beginning, my well-loved copy of Beatrix Potter’s Apply Dapply Nursery Rhymes was of no interest to them. Sweet storybooks, classic and contemporary, with simple narratives and obvious morals didn’t hold their attention either. Believe me, I tried.

I could sometimes get a Shel Silverstein poem in under the radar without much backlash and Mo Willems was more than tolerated. Most of the time, though, my sons would slide off my lap and run to something more exciting, like a backhoe pushing gravel from one side of our street to the other. You might think Good Night, Good Night, Construction Site would have done the trick, but no. This was not the cozy, glowing realm of parent-child bonding I had imagined.

While I didn’t want to subscribe to a gender binary, I heard from children’s authors that, most often, the kids who aren’t interested are the boys. The ones who shout out from the back of the bookstore, “Reading is boring!” and bust out their Matchbox cars. I also heard from a librarian that kids don’t know nursery rhymes anymore. None. So, I begrudgingly put poetry on hold, but I wouldn’t give up on storybooks. I just had to go a little further afield than expected.

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By Jared Harél

I don’t remember being read to as a child. My parents were good ones—doting and thoughtful—so perhaps I was, but nothing comes to mind. In fact, I recall only three books in my childhood home, each a disregarded fixture, like doormats or drapes. In the living room, there was a mass-market paperback of The Firm. Its cover depicted some poor suit dangling over marble green, his brown attaché case just out of reach. Upstairs, a cream-colored copy of Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus sat on my mom’s nightstand, half-buried beneath coupons and ancient receipts. Lastly, we owned a massive, musty brick of Shakespeare’s Collected Plays I later learned had been there the day we moved in, and which we humored on a shelf above our treasured Nintendo. God knows how I became an English major, let alone a writer. All this is to admit that my true introduction to children’s books came when I finally had kids of my own.

What I found upon arrival was varied to say the least. I’d expected the fantastical: hippos in bow ties, transportation with faces, moral platitudes packaged in bright, garish fonts and delivered by ducklings with an aptitude for end-rhyme couplets. And sure, there was plenty of that. But there were other things too, like the hypnotic lullaby of Goodnight Moon, or the spare, incisive grace of Last Stop On Market Street, as clear and nuanced as a classic blues song. In the latter, as CJ and his nana begin their long bus ride home, I encountered the following lines: “The outside air smelled like freedom, but it also smelled like rain.” This was writing of strangeness and beauty. A children’s book can do that? I vividly recall thinking, till my pajama-clad kids poked my stomach, eager to get a move on, to keep reading.

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By Sunni Brown Wilkinson

In one of his most famous poems, Richard Wilbur writes that “love calls us to the things of this world,” and no children’s literature celebrates the things of this world quite like Arnold Lobel’s charming Frog and Toad series. Beyond its beautiful illustrations and clever humor, the series revels most in a love of what keeps us alive and of language itself. In this way, the Frog and Toad series becomes, in many ways, a gateway to the world of poetry.

Stylistically, the Frog and Toad books, vignettes about two close friends sharing in life’s adventures, mirror poetry more than prose. As books for early readers, they include language that is simple but musical, and the text does not always reach the end of the page but rather breaks at certain words, like a poem. This amplifies the pleasure of reading them aloud (as they should be read), but it also means that, like poetry, each line holds its own weight and carefully wrought cadence.

For example, in the story “Spring,” Frog’s description of Spring reads like a catalogue of the joys of being alive. As Frog tries to rouse Toad from his winter hibernation, grumpy Toad complains about the bright light, to which Frog kindly replies,

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By Eric Redfern

      A small speckled visitor  
              wearing crimson cape,
      brighter than a cherry,
              smaller than a grape.

      A polka-dotted someone
            walking on my wall,
      a black-hooded lady
            in a scarlet shawl.

At five years old, I experienced this Joan Walsh Anglund poem as both charming and creepy. The lilting trochees and cheery rhyme scheme told me that to read the poem was to play a friendly game. But the red cape and black hood? These are the sartorial choices of a villain. A villain, not the villain: there were more of them, and by the fifth line my world would blur at its edges, where tiny, spotted, unidentified “someones” almost palpably teemed. Most troubling and fascinating of all, I could not determine if this “lady” was a bug or a woman, small or tall, dangerous or safe. Anthologies have resolved this ambiguity for their readers by titling the poem “Ladybug,” much as Mabel Loomis Todd domesticated Dickinson’s poems with ordinary titles like “The Bee” or “The Humming-Bird.” But in the illustrated book I had, Anglund’s poems were untitled, and the ambiguity strikes me now as appropriate: ladybugs are “good” garden denizens; most are also carnivorous. Reading about the poem’s “speckled visitor,” my mind made something like a 3-D hologram portrait that morphs into a specter as it’s tilted first one way, then another. Haunting each other, both images stayed strange.

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By Adrienne Su

Since my parents always made room for more books in our Atlanta home, I thought I knew what I was doing when, at six, I decided to be a writer. I wrote my first “poem” soon afterwards, in 1974, and never went back on the decision, producing stories, poems, and attempts at novels. Yet not until college did I write from the perspective of an Asian American speaker. One reason for the delay is surely that children’s books with Asian characters, never mind Asian American characters, were vanishingly scarce. A 2016 study by Angela Christine Moffett, “Exploring Racial Diversity in Caldecott Medal-Winning and Honor Books,” found that of the 332 Caldecott books published between 1939 and 2016, thirteen, or 1%, had Asian or Asian American primary characters. My brother and I recall from our childhood only two picture books with Asian main characters: The Five Chinese Brothers, by Claire Huchet Bishop and illustrated by Kurt Wiese (1938), and Tikki Tikki Tembo by Arlene Mosel and illustrated by Blair Lent (1968) both of which are still in print.

The Five Chinese Brothers, in which the titular characters use superpowers to evade a death sentence, has been criticized for racially caricatured illustrations and the unexplained identicalness of the brothers. Defenders argue that the book evokes nostalgia for many, the art represents a different time, and it’s based on a Chinese folktale.

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By Jeff Tigchelaar

But I, I love it when you read to me
And you, you can read me anything.
—Stephin Merritt, “The Book of Love”

“I tried to get lots of poetry ones,” said the mom. She’d been to some thrift stores and library sales. She handed her son a big bag of kids’ books. They were for his children, the mom’s grandkids.

By “poetry ones” the mother meant rhyming ones. By telling her son this, she meant, “I know you’re a poetry person.” By that she meant, “I know you’re somewhat of a snob.”

Ten years later . . .

“Dad. What are you doing? I’m in bed. I’m sleeping in here.”

“Sam. Sorry. I need to write something about kids’ books. I kind of waited a little too long, and they’re kind of starting to lay out the magazine. I just needed some material from your shelves.”

“Nope.”

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