Issue 125

How much better versed I’d be / with wings spun / from sap of grass

Great Expectations is far more than a novel of politics, or even a novel of history or race or society. It is, subtly and surprisingly, a novel of religion—not of spirituality, but of religion: the repeated motions performed by a community that express a shared conviction about how we ought to live as composites of the fixed and the fleeting.

My married friends have houses and backyards.
I envy their space, their gardened privacy,
but not their mortgage.

Most days, belief in anything beyond the day before me felt unfathomable. But my disorientation presented me with an opening, a paradoxical invitation to entertain what I would typically have considered beyond the barometer of belief.

As children, we did not say God in anger. God was ____, was holy, meant revelation, infinity, abyss, also ______ too powerful to utter.

I think you should not be afraid

Let’s be grateful for doorstops.

The father makes coffee, weary and quiet,
as the child tries to imitate his grief.

Your name is splashed across the sky at night, / like some kind of petty graffiti,