Issue 113

That we are all adopted, appallingly / co-opted into Christ’s holiness is
a simple given, and a certainty. / So relax.

The microcosmic richness of human identity is a reflection of the God who not only made us but sees us, knows us, and speaks to us. Our being addressed by the divine is an infinite well for human possibility.

Can a four-year-old understand stealing?

What does an artist give up for art?

A story gets away from its author.

When fiction leaves questions unanswered

“Parable, / which is to say / not an allegory. An opportunity / for displacement.”

“The old / cars had iron, the new, light aluminum / alloy, chromium, even plastic. / My father-in-law with Alzheimer’s walking / along Highway 6 to flag a semi.”

She was pretty sure she was too crazy to be a mother, and when the yearnings showed up, every few years, they now passed quickly.

Perhaps all these / years God has denied me / the little grace / I hoped for in preparation / for the larger / one

On the decay of flowers. “I love the way they teach me to love / the things I can’t get close enough to.”

Jonah was on the lookout for enemies everywhere, just like his late father, whose vigilance ultimately proved prophetic if futile.

I think now is an interesting time, when the dialogue between religion and science can advance our understanding of the world like a mirror.

I need / a blessing and I am not blessed.

I maintain that we need more of her: the vessel, the container, the harbor.

Micah Bateman channels T.S. Eliot, slantwise. “In the room the women come and go / Talking of Leo DiCaprio.”

The insides of our mothers’ bodies are the only places that are most certainly past. From then on, from there on, every room is just an echo of that first, red room.

Just imagine how it must be for the maker, the mind / behind creation who weaves it all together in an expansive act of love

Like a person caught in quicksand, the Schrader male antihero struggles toward salvation only to be driven deeper into the thing that’s swallowing him whole.

“Truth and justice are two points so fine that our instruments are too blunt to touch them exactly” —Pascal

I recorded the pet ouroboros / ate / bookended / möbius stripped / just had an all-around
naked voiced weekend.

In the myth, Adam, the man, labors above / warm red earth, voracious earth that takes / the life it gives into itself, as soon replenishes… / What have we done, or what through us was done?

Caesar, highest, / seated where Caesar sits, the granite drape / of his vermilion cape, and there beneath it / Caesar’s bare breast

“Philosophy of art should start in the studio and not in the museum or the concert hall or library” (Susanne Langer)

Most of the artworks erased the human presence, or if it appears, it is only a fragment. There is a deep sense of absence and loneliness.… Although the figure is absent, there is still a living breath or a hand offering the possibility of healing.

to place the logic of the visible at the service of the invisible / Odilon Redon writes of painting a vase of flowers”

Architects in the Bay Area talk about concepts and ideas. I talk about poetry. I look at a design project and ask, how can I make something emotionally meaningful?

Preacher-lady donned her slender catch of cloth / & ushered folk in. She said a few words, had us linger / with loneliness awhile.

The ancients,” she says, “thought rivers began in heaven.” / Don’t they? But I’m too amazed to listen. / “We have the same words,” I say. “In our ancient Bible / all the rivers run to the sea. But ours return.

Many have lamented that we don’t have a Lewis to help us think through these questions (or a Chesterton or a Tolkien to help him), but in my estimation Sally Rooney comes pretty close.

She now wanders at large to the notorious peril to her soul.

Is a spoon still a spoon, ——————————bent by two hands to look more ——————————————————————–—like a moon? Some nights, I take a walk down to the cul-de-sac, lay myself on the gravel, ————–—play a different kind of dead. It sounds like a fiddle. The boy calls me sylvan, ——————————eagle-boned & I know what he means. He…

Yesterday our children, playing / in a tree, watched as the tiniest bird / fell from above them, / where it belonged, / to land below them, / where it did not.

Even though Aylon painted it in 1978, there were still oil drops around the outside of the frame. The painting appeared to drip.

I felt hungry every / day and reveled in it. No sin could stain me the more I abstained.

Someday, in heaven, you insist / apologetically, we won’t have / these bodies

In no world was there enough medication, technology, or manpower to keep everyone alive.

the lord / has mocked / has envied and spied / has burlesqued and lined / with fine material / this moss

Nothing terrible lurks outside our great and meady hall. The night is not / a warning. The flood is not a lesson.

The rag-trimmed tree confounds me, / Leafy with crosses and beads: / Not a merry December fir; grim in June to see.