Issue 108

“Literature…can hold up those things that mainstream society doesn’t believe: that Black people are there. One of my jobs is just holding that up to the light so that everyone can see that they’re there.”

I’m waiting for that strange experience when a picture speaks, sometimes in a whisper, sometimes with a shout, sometimes with a reverberating silence that pulls me to the edge of a precipice where I’m not sure whether I’ll fall or fly.

The racetrack, famously built before we knew of such things, straddled a fault line at the joint of two very active plates. As a result, fissures spread through the walls of the old grandstand like capillaries. The world was tearing it apart naturally.

Our blood sugar was so high that our wounds
had stopped healing. We were either a tapestry
of Band-Aids or very careful.

One second he was riding on the river and the next he was in it, watching his canoe float away upside down, its silvery hull a bright line on the dark river.

When my mother said
Linda
and looked that look, I could

see it all before me.

I think the stations are for everyone, no matter your religious affiliation, because they are a meditation on being human, so I wanted people to see them without the hurdle of having to enter a religious space.

from where I was broken I could not flee.

The dog / rests her head on my knee. A person is not like a god. / A person is not like a dog.

Sometimes I wish God / would have loved the world less and kept his son.

I’ve always tried to work by addition and not subtraction.

And because I’m a taker by nature, / I am suspicious, exhausted, on guard / against tax refunds, friendships, erasures

The words can suddenly turn to vapor or stones. They have a way of wriggling out of our grasp just when we thought to touch them. This can happen to the wise as well as to the foolish.

This evil that I feel, that I taste, that makes the roads slick, is there no end, no fruition to it? It comes from somewhere, sufficient to find out where.

The words can suddenly turn to vapor or stones. They have a way of wriggling out of our grasp just when we thought to touch them. This can happen to the wise as well as to the foolish.

As usual Tempest’s strands were many. In conversation she was like a fisherman with a number of lines which she was constantly checking, to see if some unlucky bullhead or catfish might have gone for the bait.

Earth stands / on end, listening. / The acid sun turns on / limes green

He feels such an urge to make things mean, / including his mood. He’s had that longing, / drunk or sober, all his life.

We remember how we’d drink with him, and more / than half our gang are dead as he is now.

I’d read that they were edible, so, using both hands, I plucked one from the ground and carried it inside, where I moved it, slowly, from the table to the fridge and then back outside.

At present, we are standing inside of the pandemic, and so its bitterness defines first and foremost how we feel about it.

What would you give / / to have heaven be the way you imagine, / made of the familiar and welcoming?

Meaning does not only happen when we make it. We make meaning out of a world that is already meaningful.

Later on, in high school, I would see those same artworks in my books and listen to my professor explaining their importance. Probably because they were within a five-minute walk and I knew them by heart, I didn’t have any real interest in them, nor in any of what Pasolini would call “my intimate, profound, archaic Catholicism.” I was interested in Hegel.

I must take shoes and clothes off and leave them on the bank for nakedness is water’s first language.

The one thing I’m certain you created / is desire, different forms of it, / cut from the same bone far and / / high in the night.

One way to describe what O’Keeffe did with landscapes is to say that she was trying to figure out a way to look out at the horizon and to see things out there as deeply as she was able to see things like flowers and plants up close.

Upward / movement of us is vain, said Simone / Weil, if it doesn’t come from a downward / movement. Go down to the river. / The counterweight. Down / without talking with father, mother, / brother, sister

Obviously, autobiographical experience, even matched to extraordinary artfulness, cannot be the lone standard against which to measure the accomplishment of a novel.

The wind unshouldering rain,
they huddle into the concave
of the day by windowpane

After the rain, all over the island
wild irises find their throats
open into astonished song.

O, I write to you now Lew / Wallace to say that a deal is a deal / is a deal, and that everything is possible / under our eye-squinting American sky.