Who Is My Mother, Who Are My Brothers?
By Essay Issue 61
This essay will appear in Jesus Girls: True Tales of Growing Up Female and Evangelical, an anthology from Cascade Books, edited by Hannah Faith Notess. ON THE DAY of my baptism, my father stood at the back of the church—hung-over, or quite possibly drunk even at that early hour—and shouted, “Hooray for Sara!” as…
Read MoreWoman Holding a Balance
By Poetry Issue 69
If the painting-within-the-painting, hanging on the wall behind the standing woman— with its sinners wailing at Christ’s feet on Judgment Day— if that might be one way of looking at it, then the woman herself, who half obscures the painting, is another. All we know of her is what we see: how—weightless, effortless as flame—she…
Read MoreWhen the Lord Returns in His Creaturely Perfection
By Poetry Issue 72
He will burrow and gallop, buffalo the prairie again, penguin the unhatched egg, then sleep off centuries of miracles with the three-toed sloth. What a magician, one minute pirouetting among banks of cumulus, the next grazing underground cafés with the star-nosed mole. Out of caves, from under bridges, a million translations of a single verb,…
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