More on: sacrifice

I was born out of terror,
             horn-caught and tangled,

                            pulled from the brush
with a cry of thorn and leaf.

I used to ask myself why humans go through sacrifices and insist on creating things that no one asked for or cares about. But not anymore. I realize that, in my case at least, it is simply an instinctive drive to do, and that’s my way of being.

Paul Mazursky, director (1982) Kalibanos welcomes you to his comfy cave, and if the Sony Trinitron proves defective so too does the illusion that you had slipped free from the world and its ubiquitous corruptions, that you could simply say you would no longer play the soul-eroding role of mute, complicit slave. Many frames will…

A DERVISH WEARY OF WALKING in circles over the hot sands of the desert used to bring his vagrant body to the first hardy haloxylon shrub or moist tamarisk which invited him into its slim and fragile shade, and from inside that shelter he used to shut his bright red eyes, and then the heat of…

LENT SHOULD BE in the summer that she might make use of the hotel pool, bandaged up outside like an open wound. She never had a pool. She had a cat but her cat is dead. Buried in leftover snow behind the garage until the ground softens. It would be nice to swim in a pool.…

I DECIDED that if I was going to read the Hebrew Bible, I was going to read the whole thing. Every word of it. No skipping over or skimming the genealogies, the instructions for building the temple, or the details of animal sacrifice. I bopped through the intricate plots of Genesis and Exodus, my rule…

The following is adapted from the commencement address for the Seattle Pacific University Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing delivered on August 7, 2010. THIS PROGRAM IS blessed to have its intensive, ten-day residencies at two of the most beautiful places on the continent: the high desert of Santa Fe, New Mexico, and…

The explosives belt was ticking On his terrified body, And from the wells of his eyes screwed into him That very morning there dripped Farewell tears for Isaac. Soon there are the mountain, altar And cotton-wool faces of the angels. Luckily, a minute before the blast God reminded him there is A God. Translated by…