Issue 127

The story of my family was spread out there every day. It is the gathering of family that drives the paintings, and my life.

Two years after the Pot Peak fire
the color returns to the wheat.

Cliff walls ascending, seagulls
ascending, skyward and calling out, circling over
the schools of herring and diving again to the sea.

I remember her first cries, high-pitched and alien, as if coming from another world into this one, into all this mystery and peril.

But art aspires—art is only human.

Mortals are not designed to bask in joy,
though life be only borne by dreams of it.

An atom
is a fantastic
abacus,

In my dream, W.H. Auden and his husband
are talking about how much they enjoy playing house
in the ersatz suburb where I grew up.

Children practice first person
by choosing

between red and green,
dog and cat.

So when I say that being a woman has always been a problem for me within my Mennonite family, what I am also saying is that my body has always been a problem, because I want to own and control it fully, and that does not make for a good Mennonite woman.