Issue 106

And my flesh, my body, held

the kingdom of God, and if it’s a place that’s a place
for children, then most of what I know really doesn’t matter.

You carry our son in a locket
you hang around your neck

each morning, a way, I guess,
of carrying what isn’t and what is

In my mind,

my son cannot be nowhere, and yet I cannot imagine
where he is, except here, growing older inside me.”

The counselor says that I am in the romance phase. She is right. I am in love with heroin and with the needle, the whole ritual, in love even with the bruises on my arms.

You are two atomized
in one, our molecules
become wild air that whims
the world…

Katharine Blake on birth.

James Chapin on prison literature’s long moment—a review of books by Albert Woodfox, Tayari Jones, Zachary Lazar, Rachel Kushner, and Jackie Wang.

Laura Budofsky Wisniewski hears from her Bubbe’s ghost.

Hadara Bar-Nadav on praying at Jerusalem’s Western Wall.

The monument is essentially didactic: look on my works, ye mighty. But the ruin, the legless trunk, is often the real lesson, on the passing of time and the erosion of reputation.