Issue 112

imagine a sleeping God / dreaming springtime: the dirt / coughing up its green, the old, / vacant throat reversing its / swallow

I had heard of men like these, their fingers / striking the valves to yield the word of God.

Even John Calvin, who forbade the use of images in worship, waxed eloquent on the beauty of the natural world and the presence of God in the theater of creation. Arranged flowers seem an ideal way to bring that “third book” of God into the sacred space.

The first pregnancy: “my belly growing big, for what? / no one can tell me what’s going on. / nausea I don’t understand, weeping / for hormones with no name.

At night they slept in the car / like angels thrown against a tree.

We downed ginger beer and punch; drank / in our parents’ fear of standing out— / never Boston nor Brahmin enough.

Still, the novels and histories of madness couldn’t hold a candle—well, maybe Plath could—to stories of the Complete Nervous Breakdown I’d heard throughout childhood. My grandmother always had a story about somebody she knew who’d broken down.

I guess having a sister is about
more than just a body.

I think Hart wanted—he was nothing if not a man of magnificent and consuming desires—the wrong things, or things to which he was not quite entitled. I have wanted them too

never mind
the fickleness of the light
here, the damp that would

a more flimsily
rooted loveliness
drown.