Issue 119

As many times
as the doctors look,

my good breast mirrors back 
nothing but good.

I believe memoir is the most intimate of genres and, for that reason, an excellent literary response to loneliness.

Finally, you add a layer of cookies, and—voila!—a chessboard. Then you let the whole thing sit in the refrigerator until the cookies get soft, and, oh, sweet Jesus, it is so gloriously rich, so simple but so good, like the very best things about Appalachia, sweet iced tea and ghost fireflies and steep, winding roads leading nowhere in particular and everywhere all at once

The mountains encircled him
like elders less stern
than his father the pastor
who warned him that whatever
gave him pleasure was a sin,

even sledding…and, later, painting.

A hen, however, is not a word. Let us be clear. She is a living creature, a being to be experienced. She is her own center of consciousness. She cannot be explained, will never be solved.

I knelt naked in the grotto west of the meditation pool—
the closest in years I’d gotten to belief. Around her feet:

cockle shells, one gold earring, a crochet-covered rock,

Though my answer wobbled on the edge of insincerity, I knew it was the right one. I have always known how to give the right answer. The cost of giving the wrong one was too great.
I knew it was the right answer because Brother Mark savored it. His face relaxed into admiration, as if I were a young dog who had just accomplished a complex trick.

Fear not, a voice said.
And out of the voice emerged a figure.
He looked like a man
but we knew he wasn’t.

As a curator, I have a nearly mystical sense of the power of objects to open a portal between history and today, lives long ended and lives currently unfolding.

It’s interesting to me how quick we are to trust a museum’s account of history simply because it’s presented in a way that feels organized and professional. We gloss over whatever seems unappealing or doesn’t fit into the story we are trying to tell. In many ways, I think fiction can tell a more honest story than what we consider to be the truth.