Ellie@Home by Nicole Kapise-Perkins

To the Light of September By W. S. Merwin When you are already here you appear to be only a name that tells of you whether you are present or not and for now it seems as though you are still summer still the high familiar endless summer yet with a glint of bronze in the chill mornings and the late yellow petals of the mullein fluttering on the stalks that lean over their broken shadows across the cracked ground but they all know that you have come the seed heads of the sage the whispering birds with nowhere to hide you to keep you for later you who fly with them you who are neither before nor after you who arrive with blue plums that have fallen through the night perfect in the dew

We began the day with rain today, carrying over from yesterday. Now the day is beautifully sunlit, but as much as I enjoy lovely sunshiny days, a small part of me misses the rain.... A Prayer for Rain By Lisel Mueller Let it come down: these thicknesses of air have long enough walled love away from love; stillness has hardened until words despair of their high leaps and kisses shut themselves back into wishing. Crippled lovers lie against a weather which holds out on them, waiting, awaiting some shrill sign, some cry, some screaming cat that smells a sacrifice and spells them thunder. Start the mumbling lips, syllable by monotonous syllable, that wash away the sullen griefs of love and drown out knowledge of an ancient war— o, ill-willed dark, give with the sound of rain, let love be brought to ignorance again. Originally appeared in the March 1964 issue of Poetry magazine.

I hope this finds you and your loved ones well. My family has been fine during this stressful time, anxiety a little high but nothing debilitating, and certainly nothing we haven't been able to work through. Still, each day is an exercise in uncertainty, wondering if we are doing enough to keep ourselves and others safe, wondering if our luck will change, and what we will do if that does happen. We recently learned that our boy will not be going back to school next month (we weren't going to send him anyway), and now my husband and I are trying to figure out how we are going to oversee our son's virtual schooling while both of us are working full time. My husband has said that is the main topic of canversation in his workplace, as many of his coworkers are parents to school-age children and both parents are working. It is less of a conversation at my workplace; not so many of us have school-age children, though a handful have school-age grandchildren. Because I work