Issue 114

You flinched a moment ago when you thought
you heard unseasonable thunder.
Like a judgment.

It had been four months since we’d run out of money. Somehow, we were still afloat.

On her last visit to the hospice, my niece
watched a flock of red-winged blackbirds
settle in the tree outside the window,
as if waiting for my mother to join them.
My brother, the pastor, calls this a God wink.

My wife
Is reading D.H. Lawrence and says she wants to get a tattoo. She says that I’m not “deep,”
And maybe she’s right.

From the night woods, wild things come to possess
The fields they’ve lost to human violence
And savvy, as the dark itself returns to bless
The troubled mind with sleep.

Later, looking at his partially closed eyes, she suddenly remembered a creole word from the country where she had spent her childhood. Sodade. A mixture of nostalgia, tenderness, and yearning, a sense of the fragility of happiness.

Can the aesthetic life lead us to God?