Issue 130

Jamie Quatro brings to her fiction a poet’s awareness of language, a historian’s sense of tradition and folklore, and a theologian’s concern with eternal questions. She is the author of I Want to Show You More (a New York Times Notable Book and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award and National…

The eyes of the axolotls spoke to me of the presence of a different life, of another way of seeing. —Julio Cortázar, “Axolotl” (translated by Paul Blackburn) WHEN I FIRST MET those bedridden children in the Kingston slums, their existence disturbed me. I wondered why God would create such useless beings, whose only inheritance was…

YOU ASKED ME IN YOUR LETTER about lost loves. There is a certain pleasure in remembering them, is there not? In looking them up and being startled by what the years have done to them (surely they have not done the same to us), in laughing at our foolishness to have once been so besotted,…

The following was delivered as the keynote address at Image’s 2026 Glen Workshop in San Diego, California. A FEW WEEKS AGO, I was watching an old interview with the writer and classicist Anne Carson. It was the kind of revenge internet procrastination that happens late at night after you’ve spent your day tangled in stressful,…

-even the blossoms of heal-all.
Everyone has something to spirit away—
——-the mother at the well’s stone altar,

her daughters praying in the shade.
——-The forlorn, Paddy called them. All of us
who find our way through the thorny gorse.

–—to light eternal your name—even if they’d take us away—we live on,
———————-—curious, igniting, ricochet, even if—just for one more day—

My love, I can’t fathom you
nor life without the memory of you.
The preacher says there’s nothing
new under the sun. I argue
he forgets our forgetfulness.

The beetle in the rose brings news of God.
His hunger for beauty will kill us all.

We come into dusk
on roads narrowed by briar,
dewberries firing red
and purple musk in heat.

Then the archangel spoke. The Tree of Mercy that exudes
A strenuous air, that bears an ocher stain beneath flanks
Of white leaves, whose blossoms brush the fruits animals
May eat, when the flank of white leaves stirs, it blushes,
What the season of offering does to its scapegoat victims,
After the forces of the design scorched its cast-iron sea,
And despite what remains, the rotten air burns out a shell,
And despite what remains, some try to rebury the dead.
And the archangel spoke.