Issue 118

In tender protest, / my world is another color.

I am just about / ninety percent apple at this point—all out // of baskets and stuck on a riverbank smack-dab / in the middle of orchard country.

When our knees touched, I felt it was because of a shared understanding of what it meant to feel like prey.

I mean I need to love with the love that is milk before the pitcher / shatters

Good evening. Are you an angel?

All those promises. / Every teardrop wiped away… / Insufficient, Lord.

A realization with the acrid smell / of distant fires.

Gwanda was an entertainer who received applause alongside floggings and detentions. No matter how much the teachers punished him, he always kept a smile on his face, a pleasant kind of protest.

The body that gives poetry. The body that picks up the brush or tackles the clay or sets its hand to write a poem. If, at Image, our imagination is nourished by God incarnate, we are also nourished by a body given.