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My Own Private Garfunkel
When I was nineteen and beginning to perform as a singer-songwriter, I found out that rock ‘n’ roll was not without its share of interlopers intent on shoehorning themselves into the musical action. Most of them insist they are expert tambourine players, but tend to be more adept at stealing the spotlight. I would have welcomed a tambourine player. Instead, I had Mark, who insisted he could sing....
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Songs Everyone Can Hear
In 1990, when the New Kids on the Block were so popular that Walmart carried sleeping bags with the band members’ faces emblazoned on them, I joined the masses and bought the band’s second album, Hangin’ Tough. It felt good to be at one with the masses. Up to that point, I listened almost exclusively to Christian artists, and none of my sixth-grade classmates knew who they were....
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The Disrobing Trees
When I was younger, I thought people who wrote poetry about trees were barking mad—and probably a few couplets short of a poem as well. That a person could pine for a pine tree or be sick with amore for a sycamore was patently absurd to me. As a child, my parents sometimes drove my sister Alyssa and me around town to marvel at the disrobing trees of autumn. Mom and Dad were all agog, their mouths....
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The Flowering Dark
At the end of a recent two a.m. feeding, our four-month-old transformed into a fountain, soaking our bedsheets with milk. There in the damp darkness, I remembered a similar season in my life when my finicky heart could not help but reject whatever I fed it. There is that old metaphor of the New Year as a baby, unblemished and filled with possibility. In rejecting her mother’s milk, Evie reminded me of....
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The Cannibal and the Eucharist
When I first heard Michael Knott singing about a woman suspected of eating her husband, the Eucharist was the furthest thing from my mind. The chasm separating communion and cannibalism was wide, or so I assumed. But the more I thought about it, the more I felt something like a fist balling up in my belly. It was 1994, and I was 16, the son of a Baptist minister. Each item in my brain-box was neatly nestled in its....
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Current Issue
Issue 72
Memoir by Lauren Winner, Poetry by James Harpur, Art by Guy Chase and Adrian Wiszniewski
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