Issue 123

On my first morning, I read from John’s Gospel, “Let us also go, that we may die with him.” It felt like a prophecy, the way my life would go. Something I could accept, because it would make meaning.

I was only twenty, driven by a dreamy conviction that life would unfold exactly the way I wanted. Others told me I floated through the world. This they said with a mixture of pity and scorn. I didn’t know what they meant; I’m still not sure I do.

sacrament of

bleached exteriors of jars, boxes,
and cans, of strip-and-shower

Watch the author discuss this essay in his InStudio interview. OUR FIRST TIME WAS IN NEBRASKA. It was winter. Holiday Inn Express. We fucked once in the shower and again, later, while watching a documentary about glaciers. I remember snow fell from the night sky and we watched it from our bed. I remember the…

My sanctuary from the sanctuary
was a dim Sunday school room.

In making nettle cloth, Brown joins fiber makers across history, including his own ancestors.

the bird chirp snagged in the wind of ticking hours.

While I was uninterested in the Bible stories of Sunday school, the quiet ritual of the service and the music appealed to me.

Will the divine elegance that science reveals in nature provoke wonder and a re-enchantment of his world, allowing him to break free of the reductive frame? Or is it merely an evolutionary survival instinct to ascribe meaning to what Richard Dawkins calls a universe of “blind, pitiless indifference”?

For the brown of the known to be green for the kiss
Of the tragic to be depth of the sword for the cream