Poetry by Ilya Kaminsky, Katherine Fallon, and Robert Hayden; fiction by Amy Hempel; and an essay by James Marcus

~
Inhabitant of earth for fortysomething years 
I once found myself in a peaceful country. . . .  
--From "In a Time of Peace," a poem by Ilya Kaminsky, The New Yorker (February 18 & 25, 2019), pp. 64-65.  "In a Time of Peace"was included in his 2019 collection, Deaf Republic (Graywolf Press).

Milk bones.  Cat food.  Someone else's grandmother's 
stewed tomatoes.  Chocolate covered this, that.
--From "Choke," a poem by Katherine Fallon, which appears on a downloadable broadside from Broadsided Press with artwork by Millian Giang Pham (June 15, 2020).  The link also includes a note on the timing of the publication and a Q&A with the author and artist.

That reminds me of when I knew a romance was over.  I had not seen this fellow in a while, but he suggested we meet up at the train station and take the Acela somewhere, so I thought we'd have several hours to catch up.  And then at the station, we boarded and he led me to our seats in the Quiet Car.  
--From Sing to It, a collection of short fiction by Amy Hempel (Scribner, 2019).  This segment is from "The Quiet Car" (pp. 77-80 in the trade paperback version of the book, which I would recommend over the hardcover purely for the cover art).

Increasingly unsteady even with the walker, he would fall, sometimes knocking over pieces of furniture, creating great crashing sounds that were hard to attribute to such a small, smiling man.  Every time, he got up off the floor--with assistance--and declared that he was fine.  He didn't break an ankle, a hip, a leg, the injuries that so often lead to a death spiral in the elderly.  "You can knock me down, but you can't kill me," he liked to say, dusting himself off. 
--From "Blood Relations," an essay by James Marcus, The New Yorker (March 11, 2019), pp. 34-39.  The piece appeared online with the title "Family Medicine."

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. . . .  
--From "Those Winter Sundays," a poem by Robert Hayden which has been widely anthologized.  (I first read it in 2007 after it was included in the Favorite Poem Project.)  It has also appeared in an earlier form in A Ballad of Remembrance (1962), as well as in its current form in Angle of Ascent: New and Collected Poems (W. W. Norton, 1975) and Collected Poems of Robert Hayden, edited by Frederick Glaysher (Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2013).