Articles

Noah and his family pretend not to see the children on the boat. Children, teenagers, some tiny, some large and hairy, a wild pack who slide through the debris tunnels or hide in the great room eleven cubits down. Who did they throw overboard to make room?

Like the strange paradox of social distancing, where we step away from our neighbors in order to protect them, so the artist loves the world by retreating from it. The art of solitude is ultimately social.

She reads their names aloud, 
men, beloved to some, 
lynched in Little River County,
Arkansas, each appellation
engraved on a six-foot 
steel slab

Music is what I call an anti-commodity—a thing that isn’t exhausted when used or given away but gets larger and more valuable, like the fish and loaves in the gospel. In that way, a song is like love or friendship or trust, those other anti-commodities that increase with the giving.

I made you a promise I intended to keep:
I will cover my body; I will keep your words near
like the pearl at the curve of my ear. 

It wasn’t long before I began
pinching myself for fat, for acne, learned
to hate my body in a swimsuit, in clothes.

I pace the cracked suburban paving.
Fiats gust, lizards flick, Jesus

Christ: that ankle-speck of a rat hound 
bashing the railings, baying.

If I’m to be serious about my music, or any art, I shouldn’t put it toward anything as problematic as God, but toward ambition, achievement: the only reliable gods.

It wasn’t a death exactly, though I’ve been
undone by deaths the same way.

It was the season of the prayer for rain. To condense, to cloud, to empty out, to rain. And nothing is familiar but the rain.