Issue 104

Once a week he holds me against him like a child and I inhale wood and horse and earth, sometimes  sweat (not sharp with the agony of hurry but warm,   like a tree trunk seeping sap on a sunny day); I keep  my eyes closed, as if afraid time will shift like a rocking boat beneath my feet, and that…

God the God of the cement silo, sunset-stained,
and the conveyor
                                         running through the night.

I was born out of terror,
             horn-caught and tangled,

                            pulled from the brush
with a cry of thorn and leaf.

Laughter is one way in which I experience God, and so I want to write about the ways in which I am sometimes lucky to experience the divine, as friend. A friend who makes you laugh out loud, and who makes you weep. I’m a weeper, and that too is a gift from God.

I used to keep my beliefs about hell tucked latent in the hidden place. After Joe died, they began to eat at their cupboard, like moths in a sweater drawer.

In Leonardo’s  
Annunciation, 
is there a dove?  
I certainly can’t 
find one—but  
Leonardo is famous 
for hiding things,  

that you commit some part of your mind and heart to an unshakeable belief in the logic of global capital, which means that on a smaller scale you commit some part of your mind and heart to an unshakeable belief in the necessity of placing a two-inch needle into an instrument panel over and over and over again,