More on: fear

Our blood sugar was so high that our wounds
had stopped healing. We were either a tapestry
of Band-Aids or very careful.

There was no religion in our house. For years I thought it was a hole, a gap in the woodwork I needed to fill.

I’M AT A LAKE IN WEST VANCOUVER, British Columbia. At least I think it’s a lake. It could be a sound, or an inlet, or a bay. In any case, it’s a body of water, and with the evergreens and sizable rocks lining the shore and covering the smaller land masses across from us, against…

Why Believe in God? Over the past few years, the Image staff contemplated assembling a symposium based on this simple problem. But we hesitated. Should we pose such a disarmingly straightforward question to artists and writers, who tend to shun the explicit and the rational? Or were we hesitating because the question itself made us…

The following is adapted from the commencement address given to the first graduating class of the Seattle Pacific University Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing. The ceremony was held on August 4, 2007, as part of the MFA residency that is held concurrently with Image’s Glen Workshop in Santa Fe, New Mexico.  …

I RECALL THE FACE OF A BOY wearing a blue sweatshirt, and I want to tell him that I’ve fallen in love and that I saw a fox midday like a flare, that I saw a black bear in the laurel just this evening and that the roar of life is in me. And I…

Sent from Troy, Alabama, September 1, 2005 All things fall, all things are built again…. ————(For Bill Thompson) How empty ring the petitions of the saved, Like wind notes in an afterthought of wind When the storm’s done, though the ravaged Nearby you, nearby your salvaged town, Troop like ragged pilgrims to some central dome…

I will my soul to waken, and my soul does not wake. My mind busies itself, remembering forgotten songs from my adolescence. My mind recalls anything, so as not to listen. I will my hands to be calm, Lord, and they fly to my teeth to crease my nails. Lord, I will myself to be…

My corkscrew willow’s the last each autumn to loose its slender fingers of dried gold; first each spring to clutch my heart with, overnight, a thousand fisted buds. Today, the last thing I would wish is another emblem of grit and continuance; still, my willow models a fierce, therapeutic rage, lashing the glass in a…

I sing for fear I’ll hear the still small voice and not like what it says. I croon to make my skull full as a squat hive and the honey is my cracked song, my sting in the throat. O I know a bee is not a melody but I must come to terms with…