Articles

What is scared is what is present. Sacred. What is sacred,
clumsy finger. You walk alone like an executioner.

the psalmist attributes such steadfast grace
chiefly to the Holy One, who bestows

compassion so tightly bound to justice
that any effort to rebuild the world
requires both be lived in proper measure.

It’s no big metaphor

that our good aims have sunk to bad slapstick:
boat on the blink, the skipper doubly pissed

Eventually, all color

contracted into the tips of the cigarettes.
Small fires, big dreams, the business of spiders
and the bait slowly sinking.

I sat in synagogue Saturday morning staring up at the stained-glass
star above the bima, first through my left eye, then my right.

That is actually what I thought. That a small bird had fallen from the sky and thumped my back, and when I looked at the ground I expected to see the bloody entrails of a tailorbird, but no, it was my hair, limply coiled on the dirt, already coming undone in the breeze.

He became numb as the cool metal handcuffs were slipped over his wrists for a third time. His late father would’ve told him, “Boy, I eh make stupid children. What wrong with you?”

How much better versed I’d be / with wings spun / from sap of grass

Great Expectations is far more than a novel of politics, or even a novel of history or race or society. It is, subtly and surprisingly, a novel of religion—not of spirituality, but of religion: the repeated motions performed by a community that express a shared conviction about how we ought to live as composites of the fixed and the fleeting.

My married friends have houses and backyards.
I envy their space, their gardened privacy,
but not their mortgage.