Authors /
Tania Runyan
Tania Runyan is a poet from Lindenhurst, Illinois, and author of How to Read a Poem (T. S. Poetry Press).
Sonnet for myself at 17
To the one I love, who played violin
and twirled your hair with gracious angst:
You pried clean off your grip on sin
to sing with far and wide and deep. And lost....
January 15, 2020
The Spirit searches everything
Endless darknesses of deep space and sea
Verify something super holy’s going on
Even when your lost-in-the-middle life
Needs a shot of sanctity....
August 12, 2019
The great throne
Rabbi, I’m losing you in all these robes,like a kid tunneling through a department store rack,pummeled by grown-up fabric.The rainbow anchors its feet like a guard....
March 5, 2015
There was silence in heaven for half an hour
The full inhalationbefore the coming of the kingdom.Pencils scuttling over legal pads,hands whispering in beards.Friend, I know the sound...
February 17, 2015
Gold, by Barbara Crooker
Barbara Crooker enters the shades and brush strokes of daily life with such reverence that readers want to take notice, live better, and die better.
November 13, 2014
We cannot take anything out of this world
One of the few ways I can speak to youis sliding nylon hairs over wound aluminum,...
November 14, 2013
May the word run swiftly
Like the invisible coyotes that streak through the woodsto the fringes of our town, a bawling wind of voices.They’ve come too close, the village complains....
November 7, 2013
Put on the new self
Twenty-five years after Praying the Prayer,
when my new life was supposed to snap in place
like elastic, the smell of crisp, store-rack cotton...
October 17, 2013
Ananias of Damascus
Saul, you thug who once dragged
believers through the streets,
flinging them from their beds so hard
their arms popped from their sockets,...
September 19, 2012
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Count it all as loss
All of it: children whistling ryegrass,
my husband rubbing my back
in his sleep. Consider rubbish the sun
climbing the eye of Delicate Arch,...
July 19, 2012
Not by sight
The Jakartans offer themselves fully to the tracks,a row of living crucifixes stretched across the rails....
May 30, 2012
Man is without excuse
Perhaps you could say that in Rome, Paul,
where the olive trees of the Seven Hills
strung their pearls of rain against the sky.
And yes, as I hike Glacier Park...
April 4, 2012
No one can boast
On the tollway just south of Kenoshaspring sets the boarded-up porn store ablaze,topaz dousing the peeling paint,the harp-notes of ice on the gutters....
March 13, 2011
Buried with him in his death
We fought for one more sputterof the old life. Even though a breeze passingover your sieve of skin could send youscreaming, you muscled up your diaphragm...
March 22, 2010