More on: Editorial

if the kitchen reminds of us of anything, it’s that a new day always follows the last one. And, in it, the sun will rise. And then someone will need to make breakfast: fry an egg, put the coffee on, wash and dry the dishes left to soak. If we’re lucky, the kitchen is a place we go to keep ourselves alive. If we’re luckier still, it offers an occasion to be tender: with ourselves, with someone else, with the accumulating fabric of our days. There’s weight, and grace, in the way hours stack together. The work they offer us. The waiting they demand.

A rip is a wound—and also a place where brightness filters in. But the potential for light doesn’t mean the tearing doesn’t hurt.

The world warms up, the prairifire crabapple trees begin to drop their blossoms in almost technicolor puddles on the sidewalks in my neighborhood and, as if in concert, the base of my neck gets heavy and sore.

I’m always looking around for omens.

Really, this is why I’ve always loved and needed poems: they sustain the contemplative hours of the early, unbreeched morning, whenever you come to them.

Dwelling contemplatively is hard. The imagination is, for too many, a foreign country. Arguing about is easier than being. Perhaps this is true in the same way that it’s safer and more comfortable to talk about God than risk actual encounter.

When I go to the movies—well, when I go anywhere—Saint Augustine is always nearby. He lives in my head (and heart) rent free.

I did not expect a novel about a bisexual Latinx conceptual artist in Los Angeles to hinge on the question of whether art-making is compatible with motherhood. Then I read Yxta Maya Murray’s dazzling Art Is Everything.