Articles

Watch the author discuss this essay in his InStudio interview. OUR FIRST TIME WAS IN NEBRASKA. It was winter. Holiday Inn Express. We fucked once in the shower and again, later, while watching a documentary about glaciers. I remember snow fell from the night sky and we watched it from our bed. I remember the…

My sanctuary from the sanctuary
was a dim Sunday school room.

In making nettle cloth, Brown joins fiber makers across history, including his own ancestors.

the bird chirp snagged in the wind of ticking hours.

While I was uninterested in the Bible stories of Sunday school, the quiet ritual of the service and the music appealed to me.

Will the divine elegance that science reveals in nature provoke wonder and a re-enchantment of his world, allowing him to break free of the reductive frame? Or is it merely an evolutionary survival instinct to ascribe meaning to what Richard Dawkins calls a universe of “blind, pitiless indifference”?

For the brown of the known to be green for the kiss
Of the tragic to be depth of the sword for the cream

My sister asks me if narwhals are real.

ON A SUMMER AFTERNOON, Irmak, Mahmut, and I—three secular Muslim Turks—took refuge in the cool, cavernous Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in Morningside Heights. Our interest in the Gothic-Romanesque revival church architectural, mostly, we ambled through soaring galleries, admiring arches that shouldered the weight of the building and stained glass of biblical scenes that…

If I drape its cage to quiet it
in the night, to keep it warm.