What It Looks Like To Us and the Words We Use

Ada Limón

All these great barns out here in the outskirts,

black creosote boards knee-deep in the bluegrass.

They look so beautifully abandoned, even in use.

You say they look like arks after the sea’s

dried up, I say they look like pirate ships,

and I think of that walk in the valley where

J said, You don’t believe in God? And I said,

No. I believe in this connection we all have

to nature, to each other, to the universe.

And she said, Yeah, God. And how we stood there,

low beasts among the white oaks, Spanish moss,

and spider webs, obsidian shards stuck in our pockets,

woodpecker flurry, and I refused to call it so.

So instead, we looked up at the unruly sky,

its clouds in simple animal shapes we could name

though we knew they were really just clouds—

disorderly, and marvelous, and ours.

The Texas-based photographer Carolyn Van Houten visited her family’s farm in North Carolina, where, she said, she “recalled the seemingly endless, humid summer days” of her youth.

Many-Faced Poem

Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello

It comes up

as thunderhead

ready to break

roiling dark &

comes up as

sunflower or

cornstalk budding

kernels of light

or comes up

earthy & sweet

as soil turned

by backhoe or

perhaps as dog

nosing its way

hard between us

at the hushed crack

& flash of storm

clearing its throat

for the first

fearsome word.

Two of Damon Winter’s grandparents died recently. Mr. Winter, a New York Times staff photographer, traveled to their home in Ithaca, N.Y., where he visited places that stood out in his memory. He framed his scenes and, he said, allowed his camera “to drift up toward the sky as the light traced the journey in a single brush stroke.”

If You’re Tired Then Go Take a Nap

Adrian Matejka

I never liked bridges or cops & there

are more of both of them in the suburbs,

lording over possibilities like stumbles


do stairs. Down the blue & white set next

to the small gym after first period, shoelace

caught under a new bully’s foot. He would


have gotten stole on in Carriage House, but

not by me. Gots to chill or it’ll get worse:

in blue Jams & pushed off summer’s slick


ledge, long fall into the private pool broken

into three distinct verses: the flail & giggling

girls, the sun-stroked lifeguard’s exclamation,


& the red-handed water’s backslap rising up,

splitting into two, more chlorinated skies.

“In these images, I see icons or stand-ins for people, places or experiences that I had growing up,” said the photographer Zora J. Murff. He took these photographs in the Near North Side neighborhood of Omaha, where he is doing work as a graduate student.

’N’em

Jericho Brown

They said to say goodnight

And not goodbye, unplugged

The TV when it rained. They hid

Money in mattresses

So to sleep on decision.

Some of their children

Were not their children. Some

Of their parents had no birthdates.

They could sweat a cold out

Of you. They’d wake without

An alarm telling them to.

Even the short ones reached

Certain shelves. Even the skinny

Cooked animals too quick

To catch. And I don’t care

How ugly one of them arrived,

That one got married

To somebody fine. They fed

Families with change and wiped

Their kitchens clean.

Then another century came.

People like me forgot their names.

The photographer Nina Robinson took this series of portraits of her Aunt Jean as they visited sites from Jean’s past in Arkansas.

Valentine

Katy Lederer

I’ve slept but this has happened

yet—when the windows are dressed

in red, and the engines go by with

the keening of love birds—the last day

before the parade—everything colored

like the fifth seat from the top

of a runaway ferris wheel.


I woke in fits and starts,

blustering wind in the morning

and everything placid at night.

Todd Heisler, a Times staff photographer, took photographs while spending time with his family in Brooklyn. ​​“This is an effort to not seek photographs,” he said, “but rather let them find me.”

Ladies’ Arm Wrestling Match at the Blue Moon Diner

Jenny Johnson

My grandma always told me if life gives you lemons

throw ’em away. And so, we loosen. Shuffle off sore tendons.


Mondays. Insults catcalled out Chevy windows.

Clinking whiskey glasses, we wipe away sweat and old flames.


All I ever found in the gravel was the paper body,

what the garter snake shed. Take off that old suit, tonight.


Even as your good arm shudders to the mat, like the moon

meeting the mouth of the Shenandoah. Take off that old suit.


In new skin, come back again and again. Own this acreage,

this new ground ripping under rolled sleeves.

The photographer Preston Gannaway, who is based in San Francisco but grew up in the South, drove along the Shenandoah River seeking moments that, she said, captured the feeling of “new growth over old.”​