Issue 114

There’s always
the possibility of never coming back

My wife
Is reading D.H. Lawrence and says she wants to get a tattoo. She says that I’m not “deep,”
And maybe she’s right.

Can the aesthetic life lead us to God?

Later, looking at his partially closed eyes, she suddenly remembered a creole word from the country where she had spent her childhood. Sodade. A mixture of nostalgia, tenderness, and yearning, a sense of the fragility of happiness.

From the night woods, wild things come to possess
The fields they’ve lost to human violence
And savvy, as the dark itself returns to bless
The troubled mind with sleep.

My wife
Is reading D.H. Lawrence and says she wants to get a tattoo. She says that I’m not “deep,”
And maybe she’s right.

On her last visit to the hospice, my niece
watched a flock of red-winged blackbirds
settle in the tree outside the window,
as if waiting for my mother to join them.
My brother, the pastor, calls this a God wink.

It had been four months since we’d run out of money. Somehow, we were still afloat.

You flinched a moment ago when you thought
you heard unseasonable thunder.
Like a judgment.

of God yes by the but
not there but for the

act of yes acts of but
not a given state of

Faith’s a dissonance, a forgetfulness.

Eileen felt that she should deliver the news of her brother’s death in person. She knew she would provide no solace when the time came, that her presence would only heighten the reality of Brandon’s absence; yet her mother was nearing seventy.

After the George Floyd murder and protests, painter Askia Bilal began a series called Non-Portraits, exploring his experience of Blackness.

Push on it again,
that point of light.
What do you think
light is?

There’s always
the possibility of never coming back

Spirituality often emerges from religious sources that don’t always fit within curatorial frameworks, and these traditions have their own distinct influences on the meaning and practice of artmaking today.

I don’t think God wastes anything, our victories or our failures.

John Matthias explores the outer limits of the sonnet form.

Over their caravan, a banner emblazoned with the words of their father: That we may live and not die.

On caring for an aging parent

On prayer, air travel, and finding place.

I was trying to pray. How I yearned to pray! But I was both fascinated and repelled by this man’s presence.

Where else but in fiction—both reading and writing it—can one try on so many different kinds of salvation?

I watched through the window
sunlight performing nothing in particular while the radio announced
if someone were to die, we could not hold a funeral.

You said they loved you
because you fed them

“Minority faiths in Britain have always started their architectural journey by adapting existing buildings and creating their religious spaces in improvised and ad hoc ways.

A cloud is suspended in the west
and squalls assail us from the south,
but no one can fathom what is now.

Robert Katz assembles found materials into tableaux inspired by stories from the Torah.

India Johnson on artist books, activism, and a queer library collective in Iowa.

Is perfection aligned with intransigence? …what relation does perfection have to prophecy?

In this time of uncertainty
your father’s building
a small wooden boat

A poem for Agnes Martin.

The grids are finally gone. Even while at the facility, Agnes drove to her art studio each day to work. I think about the people who bathed her, who cut up her food into trapezoids.

I look to poets not to confirm my ideas of the world and of God but to be shaken awake by their vision.

I had always wanted to grow children here
in the cornfields, where it would be easy
to teach them about God

I didn’t like that place we lived in
before you died

When my children ask questions,
I try to answer them truthfully, which means
admitting to failure.