Devotion: For Our Bodies
By Poetry Issue 64
Yes love, I must confess I’m at it again, struggling in vain with my Greek declensions. I know it’s common, but I want to show you what I found in Praxeis Apostolon, chapter one, verse twenty-four: this exquisite epithet, kardiognosta. Forget briefly its context, that the eleven, genuflecting, implore the Lord to give wisdom. Between…
Read MoreFour Poems
By Poetry Issue 66
Knowing life grinds us, And dust Is what we’ll become. Sensing, likewise, That the moral Of our story Has to do With being mortal. Yet love grounds us. And the beloved Grows in us: We are her slow cocoon. And the poem is a door; The song, a little window. § Bowed by a ceaseless…
Read MoreThe Iberian Muse
By Poetry Issue 68
Virgin of the milk, you enchant words and they enchant you. As I grow older, leave powdered sugar on my shoulder and the smell of hunger on my neck. Bear with me, your lonely neighbor and his cup of nothing. Even your glance can be as uselessly pure as the tongue of a lion or…
Read MoreRecognizing the Stranger: The Art of Emmanuel Garibay
By Essay Issue 68
ART MAY BE CONCERNED with the creative manipulation of images, but words are always part of the picture. When we encounter a work of art, a load of labels and captions, categories and explanations always works to help or hinder our better understanding. Some are printed on the wall beside the work; others we carry inside…
Read MoreWord
By Essay Issue 75
The Word-Soaked World Troubling the Lexicon of Art and Faith Since 1989, Image has hosted a conversation at the nexus of art and faith among writers and artists in all forms. As the conversation has evolved, certain words have cropped up again and again: Beauty. Mystery. Presence. For this issue, we invited a handful of…
Read MoreForm
By Essay Issue 75
The Word-Soaked World Troubling the Lexicon of Art and Faith Since 1989, Image has hosted a conversation at the nexus of art and faith among writers and artists in all forms. As the conversation has evolved, certain words have cropped up again and again: Beauty. Mystery. Presence. For this issue, we invited a handful of…
Read MoreBeauty
By Essay Issue 75
The Word-Soaked World: Troubling the Lexicon of Art and Faith Since 1989, Image has hosted a conversation at the nexus of art and faith among writers and artists in all forms. As the conversation has evolved, certain words have cropped up again and again: Beauty. Mystery. Presence. For this issue, we invited a handful…
Read MoreColloquy
By Poetry Issue 75
from the Colloquy of Aelfric (955–c. 1010) i. Fisherman Master: Would you catch a whale? Fisherman: No. Master: Why? Fisherman: Because it is a dangerous thing to catch a whale. How do you catch a whale? No net you could knit is large enough to contain it, no hook you fashion strong enough to tug…
Read MoreAdjusting to Darkness
By Poetry Issue 76
or something in the sight adjusts itself to midnight…. —Emily Dickinson For a while, I’ve been considering nothing. The nothing my grandmother refused and my grandmother’s grandmother, all of them stretching back through the void with their kinds of certainty bracing the light of the stars. In the Methodist church, my grandmother opened her hymnal,…
Read MoreArticulation
By Poetry Issue 77
What I have come to say is never quite _____sufficient; what I have come to say falls ever short, if reliably—my one, _____my only certainty. This fact, for now, can prove both deep discouragement and deep, _____elusive hope. I’ve come to trust our words’ most modest crapshoot; I have come, as well, _____to see their…
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