Issue 117

I did not expect a novel about a bisexual Latinx conceptual artist in Los Angeles to hinge on the question of whether art-making is compatible with motherhood. Then I read Yxta Maya Murray’s dazzling Art Is Everything.

When I sit here alone, notebook lying open on my writing desk, I find I become someone other than the person I am when walking about or sitting in company or even sleeping.

The shore is brailled by detritus

So much wine—wine with food and wine without, wine while they watched the kids play in the yard and when it was just the women together on a Monday night.

Lauren was waiting for the holy word of God. It was spring. Whatever.

When the peonies bloom, come over.

The light of the soul throws sparks, can send up flares, builds signal fires, causes proper matters to catch fire.

What is it about the familiar visual vocabulary of Renaissance—the haloes, the gold leaf, the careful arrangements of figures, that makes it so ripe for borrowing?

Once you explore the revelations of science—from the multiverse to black holes, dark matter, and quantum physics—there is a realization that in our era humankind is experiencing the birth of a profound new consciousness. All births are painful and contain elements of danger and risk, but births are the necessary threshold for evolving potential.

When I listen to the oratorio, I see the canyon in my mind. I hear the soundscape from which Robert created such a moving plea for ecological awareness and urgent action. That, I suppose, is as it should be, since the Chama has, in his own words, “flowed into nearly every piece I’ve written since 1993.

The world is too scary and the children don’t care. / They don’t care because of the bombs and the fear of bombs

My relationship to the novel form is among the most important relationships in my life.

There is no more / story to tell— / except I had / not died.

sorrow is unsafe when it is real sorrow.

The world that we still live very much in the midst of, the illusory rocks that slice us open and the faces made of infinitesimal and untouchable grains that we touch and love with everything we are—this is Jesus on the earth.

-—They brought a woman who had been caught in adultery, placed her in their -—midst, and said to him, “Teacher, in the Law, Moses commanded us to stone -—such women. What do you say?” … -—Jesus bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground.   What he made of dust became me. I…

What was it he carried when he left / if not the dreams of those he’d touched?

Light on the mother’s face, she appears to sleep.

Yesterday I spoke to a man from Dussen who’d had a very hard life. / For much of his story, he was a secondary character.

Olivia was about as high-Wasp as anyone I’d ever met, with her undergraduate degree from Smith and, before that, her four years at an all-girl’s boarding school in Pennsylvania, where she claimed she’d learned a song called “We Are Anglicans.” She loved to regale us with it when she came over for Shabbat.

I’ll take nails, / long nails, / and drive them into my body.

Have you seen God yet / how he’s rushing to arrive on time by two thirty / responsibility responsibility

I don’t consume saliva, I consume You

Midwestern reticence is respect for the unspeakable, the unknowable. What we do and what is done, to each other, to ourselves. What do you say to the flood, the tower, the burning bush?

The toddlers maintain / zucchini, sing the songs / only they and those closer to the earth // Understand.

We women remained until we could not. / Time folded into a burial cloth.

WHEN SOMEBODY DIES, I WATCH MOVIES. The day my grandmother passed, I sat at the altar with the brothers in The Darjeeling Limited. Watching Adrien Brody embody the sense of utter emptiness left by his character’s father’s death somehow helped get me a little closer to my own experience, though I couldn’t articulate it to anyone…

black-robed Death never closer / with cartoon scythe and cardboard eyes.

I do not know / where pleasure leads,

If heaven exists and I’m not saying it does / I don’t imagine rolling hills flowery meadows

I know no other way to love you than to hurt you