Articles

We often imagine the act of reading as one of pure intellect, but it has a physical dimension—paper, ink, hands that turn pages, eyes that take in light. By making the “consumption” of the text literal and embodied, almost uncomfortably visceral, I hoped to gesture toward the theological implications of our embodied state: we read with both our minds and bodies because we are bodily and ghostly, matter and spirit.

The cashier read it and then handed me,
a ten-year-old boy, a pack of smokes.

Simeon and Levi went alone among the moaning
streets—think of it: every Canaanite man draped,
groins leaking through their bindings, gangrene

coming for some.

the history of trees opens with a long stretch
of uninteresting happiness.

Further down is the Other Brown House. It’s where a man bled his family to death, one by one, with a knife.

I was not allowed inside, so I pressed my
palm to the glass; my lifeline, written over
by lattice.

What was empty is slowly refilled. No outlet, just rain and evaporation. Simple.

Up the mountain light rushes.
So am I, following its dark future.

In many ways, all my poems are writings in a spiritual diary, both faithful and despairing (and seeking faith amid states of desolation).

In the corner of the kitchen window,
a crane fly is caught in a spiderweb.

It has not stopped struggling
all afternoon.