Issue 112

This one was here with all his roses. He was from a big family in Jamaica. They didn’t have much in common, except for their difference.

He took me fishing as a teen, lecturing me about boys, the proper way to chase them, and the proper way to leave if they needed leaving.

It’s a basement full of cobwebs. Mice and dust and boxes. One is filled with letters in his language, and another night, before he got on a plane to identify the body of his father, he told her of those letters.

It’s almost summer, and soon she will go to the fields with her father and her sister, catching the bales as the baler spits them, and she will lift and stack them.

War … / makes machines / whose metal eats more metal and spits its out and on / and on, and never enough, and always far too much.

Give me proof, said Thomas,

and he could see a hole in the palm before him,

and inside the wound a glimpse

The Lord does not punish with wrath but with mercy.

Artworks can transform our intellectual landscape and reorient the questions we ask, even in the sciences.