Issue 107

I lifted the calendar from / / its nail and thumbed through the other Marys: / a stylish Guadalupe radiating needles / for October, Michelangelo’s marble / draped in the corpse of Christ for March

Jesus, is he everyone’s digits, the ends of your hairs, the wife not your own, the sexless nights, the bleeding snapvine, the Lysander leaf, the dish soap, the Council of Trent, Battle of Hastings, the pill, Saint Augustine, Saint Vincent, every couplet of Shakespeare’s and each child’s drowning nightmare—does he contain them all, things lovely or horrifying, is this him, all of everything stuffed inside? How does one bear such a man as this?

Is it possible / that your experience / is a form of joy? / Or a word for joy, / in an unspeakable / tongue.

It is one thing to write an inspirational poem about the raising of Lazarus, from this great distance in time and space, and another to be Lazarus: to be the one who is raised. I think any genuine religious art leads the reader (and presumably the writer) to a place of encounter, an encounter with radical otherness.

A poem for Saint Wilgefortis, the bearded patron of women seeking liberation.

Katherine Mooney Brooks on art, illness, and the failures of the body

We played a word game on the mountain, / spelled cuneiform, spelled thoracic: / / the game’s strict rules / encourage motion / / up through thistles, saffron, / yellow stains

this is / not your tragedy this is / a scrap a slip a fragment/ a swatch of fabric cut / off the roll