Articles

Perhaps our sons are signs, agitating the distracted
to gaze at the frescos restored to the apse

I was confronted with the reality that a perfect church could not exist, that the leaders that I had grown up revering were flawed and very human.

The following year I reentered the studio to die. After fifteen days—unable to eat or sleep, my mind desperately trying to give solace to my broken life—I finally collapsed and gave up my life in radical surrender.

With a mechanical click,
The light ceases,
Leaves you deep-keeled in darkness.

Yes to mortal love and anguish.

Though Moreland does not subscribe to any traditional faith system, his music is suffused with Christian imagery and with a palpable, unorthodox longing for transcendence.

Death is so awkward.

Sometimes I think my soul is like a fist
that on occasion opens.

These recent books of psalms by Diane Glancy and Julia Fiedorczuk remind us that voices put us in the generative space of the shared, the relational; they engage us in a place of self and other, self and world, self and self.

I need her like I need the falseness
of my own voice explaining death to a toddler.