Date: 2006

"Evacuate your mind of clutter now."

— Wetzsteon, Rachel

Date: 2006

"I do my best, squeezing the static and / the agony into a straight flat line, / but soon it soars and dips until my mind's / activity looks (you can take the girl...) / uncannily like the Manhattan skyline."

— Wetzsteon, Rachel

Date: 2006

"I'm watching them all right, unruly dots / I not only can't part from but can't help / transforming into restless bodies -- they're / no sooner being thought than sprouting limbs, / no longer motionless but striding proudly, / beautiful mental jukeboxes that play / their litanies of joy and woe ...

— Wetzsteon, Rachel

Date: 2006

"Desires are your jailers; set them free / and roam the hills, smiling archaically."

— Wetzsteon, Rachel

Date: 2006

"None of them ever breathed / a word about the fact that this humming, / aromatic, acid flashback, pungent, tingly / fingered world is acted out differently / for each one of us by the puppet theatre / of our senses."

— Gerstler, Amy (b. 1956)

Date: 2006

"Curses, outbursts / and distracting chants simmer all day / long in the Crock-Pots of our heads."

— Gerstler, Amy (b. 1956)

Date: 2006

"If our thoughts / and feelings were soup or stew, would they taste / of bile when we're defeated and be flavored / faintly with grace on better days?"

— Gerstler, Amy (b. 1956)

Date: 2007

"When a human embryo is seven weeks old, / the brain shines through its forehead, a cloud / of light, belly-deep and breathing, / the whole, luminous mass cabled and alone."

— Witt, Sam (b. 1970)

Date: 2008

"Oh Bryn, you see through the dark, / Right past the fireflies that sleep in my heart."

— Koenig, Ezra (b. 1984) [Vampire Weekend]

Date: December 2009

"Like an oyster / That cloisters a spoil of pearls, / Untouched— // The heart that’s had / Enough / Stays shut."

— Essbaum, Jill Alexander