Manifest, by Reason of Birth
By Poetry Issue 85
Stars and the sun are not eternal. They flare. They wither. The earth and its high mountains, its tors and spires, aspen groves, scarred and broken bristlecone pines, torrential blizzards, are not eternal. Rivers and seas change courses, alter shores, appear, dwindle, vanish. The rampant floras, birds, reptiles, and mammals of tropical forests…
Read MoreFire in Freedom
By Poetry Issue 85
All action, it leaps, faster than the eye can follow, from treetip to trestle tower, from cedar roof to harvested fields, cartwheels and spins, leaps again and attacks, slithering up dead oaks and dry junipers, captures, holds close, strangles, suffocates all mouth in its consumption, gulping and swallowing entire acres of sere and withered stalks,…
Read MoreThe Moss Method
By Poetry Issue 85
Most lie low, flourishing with damp, harvesting sunlight, no commotion, moss mouse-silent, even through wind and hail, stoic through motors roaring fumes, through fat-clawed bears grubbing. They can soothe the knife-edges of stones with frothy leaf by leaf of gray-green life, and burned-ground mosses cover destruction, charred stumps, trees felled and blackened. Cosmopolitan mosses likewise…
Read MoreImplicit Tree
By Essay Issue 81
Implicitry \im-‘pli-sət-trē\ noun L. 1. the study of the implied lives of trees. 2. the connection, at cellular or unnamed levels, between vegetable and animal entities. 3. involved in the nature of nature. 4. archaic: entwined with trees. THE PHONE RINGS. An unfamiliar Florida area code; it could be an alligator or a mouse…
Read MoreTemple Tomb
By Poetry Issue 81
In this marrow season, trunks tarnished, paused, I am garden. Am before. Asleep. Then the changes: placental, myrrhed. Wet hem when you appeared. What did your body ever have to do with me? In my astonished mouth, enskulled molars guessed, though as yet I did not know you. You sprung. You now intransitive, tense with…
Read MorePostscript
By Poetry Issue 81
If you come to this cold bowl with ladle in the moonlight and wish to strip the old self away, on a raw, clear night, some time go out alone, toward the end of the year, on a solitary road, limned by igneous fires, lit micas of snow, until you reach a pasture of cattle…
Read MoreMan Is But an Ass
By Essay Issue 84
WHEN I WAS YOUNGER, I had two dreams. One of those dreams was to be a preacher. I wanted to preach because I loved public speaking, and because I loved memorization, and also because I grew up in the Church of Christ, which taught that baptism was the only way to get into heaven, but…
Read MoreThe Avant-Garde and Sacred Discontent: Contemporary Performance Artists Meet Ancient Jewish Prophets
By Essay Issue 83
I RECALL A SUNDAY MORNING when the church lectionary readings included a passage from the prophet Isaiah. The lay reader that morning was a thoughtful, older man dressed in a tasteful gray suit. Standing at the lectern, he opened the Bible and read: At that time Yahweh had spoken through Isaiah son of Amoz. He…
Read MoreArs Poetica: Baptismal Story
By Poetry Issue 83
My father thought the Anglican liturgy pure poetry, once, Three hundred people chanting in the multi-colors of the chancel, Saying on cue We do! Though they might have answered Otherwise in their own living rooms, together They committed to many things, the dignity Of every human being, the baby lifted high above My father’s head,…
Read MoreA Viewing Party
By Short Story Issue 83
IN THE CAR ON THE WAY to the Grosses’ my wife says, “I’m just hoping we can get to know some of these people. Like really get to know them.” I nod and she goes on, “And I don’t mean like they are projects, like we are just trying to save them.” I agree with her.…
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