Issue 109

Duck-faced, the serio-comical sermon / Goes the way of confidence art on / A Holy Week spree of Menippean arson. / Heat without light.

A poem for the thin places. “I looked, but I saw / no craftsman, no tools. The buzz buzzed on.”

It is a horrible, wrenching, annihilating sentence. Erpenbeck, in all her unsentimental moral rigor, refuses to look away from the moment of absolute horror.

An elegy for the Flintstones. “It’s a trog-eat-trog world out there.”

Sometimes in the sound and the light / it grows so still / it’s possible to forget / you are moving through the air.

I was so undone—not by Lola’s death but by the prospect of flying halfway around the world again only to turn around to fly halfway around the world again again—that I had to Skype my therapist in New Jersey for guidance. Meantime, Sam was jabbering away in idiomatically perfect Hebrew on his cell phone and telling me to chill out. “Mom, it’s not like we’re being put on the next transport to Poland.”

Night hadn’t brought forth its cache of new stars. / Nor mimosa trees folded their leaves. / She laughed, a bold and sudden laugh

When God calls you / in what voice do you respond?

The glory of the desert is to bless what diminishes

Matter is patient.