Articles

WHEN CHARLES BAUDELAIRE’S ESSAY “The Painter of Modern Life” was printed by Le Figaro in late 1863, Paris was a city in the midst of artistic revolution. For centuries, the French Academy had emphasized historical subjects and classical ideals, teaching students to take their models of beauty from the great masters of the past. But now,…

IN LATE FEBRUARY OF 2015, my husband and I left behind the snow and ice of central Indiana to drive ten hours south to the shrubby tree-lined plains just outside Wichita, Kansas—to see a puppet show. Another couple we’d met only the night before accompanied us, a sword maker who operates Cedarlore Forge in New…

I’m going to pray with my whole body.                I don’t mean snake-handling sanctifications in a wood’s hollow nor torso-rolling,      arm-waving hollering on a carpeted aisle.                        No, God of dark matter and everything in between, I’m going to concentrate                       every particle of my being, each neuron-strumming molecule, each cell            pitching and sliding beneath…

lets go of his cane and holds with both hands the pew ahead of him. Now and then he dips down, shaking, pulls himself back up. Stands still as he can while the gospel’s read. Today the Parable of the Sower. Pastor says he thinks it’s less about what kind of soil we are— rocky,…

I am going to lie down in the field, grass a green halo over my head. I’ll let the sun singe the peach, my flesh, luxurious, ruined. Let rain have its way with me so I can feel my mother’s washcloth on my face, hand I turned from. Lord, soften the hard pit of my…

While my brother and I waited for our father to die, which took longer than we thought it would, one of the hospital’s chaplains came in to visit us. Her name was Cynthia, and the first thing she did was read some passages from The Book of Common Prayer as we stood around our father—…

Piero della Francesca’s Madonna and Child with Two Angels For half an hour we had the painting mostly to ourselves, and the longer we stood there taking it in together, the more the people drifting around us seemed to disappear. We spoke quietly when we spoke at all, as though trying not to discomfort the…

The purple plant of abstinence grows in the murky shade gnaws at the caterpillar with its thorny teeth and snarls at its mealy flesh noli me tangere as if to crawl along its spiny hands the index finger stained with negatives were death, the sour wash of corpses circling down the winding drain that rusty…

The how, the where are clear enough: you left one place, arrived another, but not whole, and groaning like a sax gone short on breath, the wail of way too late to ever roll the evening back to sober, slate to clean, forgive to forget, road unglazed with ice— too late to take it back…

The sun, the darkness, the winds are listening…. —Geronimo, Chief of the Bedonkohe Apache   Boys, I shit you not, it’s Oklahoma, Billy says, the Red River more red than river squatted under the border bridge like the raw ass-end of Mars, dry skin peeled under the flying rubber of Billy’s bald tires. As I drive…