Issue 121

I think of my chest like the inside of a grand piano, each key triggering an invisible response in the instrument’s body, releasing some build of pressure within an anatomy of hammers and strings. I think about writing. It’s always a gamble to live life without writing everything down in real time—the fear of what will be forgotten haunted by anxiety over what’s already been lost. A train of inkblots surfaces behind my eyes and disappears just as quickly, like music. I try to resist reaching for metaphors, attaching any images or words that would put distance between myself and the moment as it’s happening. I try not to feel like a failure.

Sometimes he is back in our house in Anaheim, / sometimes with his family in Taiwan.

Drawing from the source directly is the practice that I call art.

I’m not even dressed before the pope
asks me for a lifelong yes.

We often imagine the act of reading as one of pure intellect, but it has a physical dimension—paper, ink, hands that turn pages, eyes that take in light. By making the “consumption” of the text literal and embodied, almost uncomfortably visceral, I hoped to gesture toward the theological implications of our embodied state: we read with both our minds and bodies because we are bodily and ghostly, matter and spirit.

The cashier read it and then handed me,
a ten-year-old boy, a pack of smokes.

Simeon and Levi went alone among the moaning
streets—think of it: every Canaanite man draped,
groins leaking through their bindings, gangrene

coming for some.

the history of trees opens with a long stretch
of uninteresting happiness.

Further down is the Other Brown House. It’s where a man bled his family to death, one by one, with a knife.

I was not allowed inside, so I pressed my
palm to the glass; my lifeline, written over
by lattice.