Articles

Night shift on Rine #4 with three thousand feet of drill pipe churning Oklahoma rock, the mud pump’s wheeze and suck, hammer of warped deck plates beneath my boots as I gaze from the rig’s north end upon treeless, dust-bowl no man’s land. The moon slithers under clouds that go all sullen and spread a…

THAT YEAR IN INDIANA, June landed like a fire arrow. It was surprising, and—for the immediate avenue it opened with those strangers who demanded interaction with Jan in the grocery line or at the gas pump—a relief. She knew she could sigh a little, wag her head as if asked to bear a great and…

Morgan Meis blogs about philosophy and art criticism at The Smart Set. His essay “Conversion” in Image Issue 80 takes an oblique approach to his coming into the Catholic Church–it’s at least as much a portrait of the elderly Sri Lankan nun who catechized him as it is a personal essay.    Image: You are a…

CERAMICIST ALLISON LUCE makes biomorphic portraits that seem almost excessively beautiful. Each piece revels in its physicality, its undeniable materiality, in its earthy substance—clay—and organic forms. Her four-part Serpent Tree series serves as an apt introduction to her work. In Primoris Ortus, for example, assemblages of swelling, vegetative curves stand alongside works suggestive of eroded rock…

Little cherub, do you not fly? Or have you landed here in clothing of light To fool the eye? If I hear you in my heart Are you not alive? What I cannot touch I feel I cannot know And yet I know you are in my knowing If knowing is a body, does it…

Does your prayer cross the street? Or is it like the skin of the serpent Scratched against a stick or sharp stone? Does your prayer shred? Has your prayer Ever heard a man cry, or touched a woman’s fur? No prayer for the smashed teeth of Ai Wei Wei held against his will? I saw…