Issue 96

When my mother awakened me as a child, her face was the entire room. Later, it was the bishop’s torso that was the whole nave. Confronting me was a blue density, the body from the ribs up. In my memory I am unable to recover the face or the words. I know there was a…

What is at first staring at birds on a wire sooner or later if you think about it becomes staring into air. This was the kind of staring I was doing the day of the blessing, face to face with the bishop, which was also the day I understood longitude and latitude by way of…

Zipped inside a nylon whale, breathing air pumped into that fishy tent, hard not to think of Jonah, sorry and scarved in seaweed, hard not to picture the ship receding, huge watery acres of abyss, breakers sweeping over. And jaws, the tight squeeze through baleen, stew of stomach acid… Until then, easy for him to…

I wouldn’t call gulping a glass of ale and backhanding foam off your upper lip a form of devotion, or the refusal to laugh at an off-color joke a sign of reverence. But I could imagine God, a wounded rat in one hand, a soothing song— I do not say on his lips. No, it’s…

What if every time we saw the word sorrow we switched it to sparrow? ——-For my life is spent with sparrows… ——-With drunkenness and sparrows… Or if it went the other way, the song would be, ——-His eye is on the sorrow…. § My eye’s on the neighbor’s eaves, and the copper-roofed house we put…

Either I’m praying, or I’m holding my hand with my hand. I suppose both are small beggings for favor, simply directed at different thrones. Across the congregation, I’m known as your son even before God’s—and what a pregnant admission that is; your voice, among the choir, is exalted, anointed a favorite by pastor and flock.…

for Granny For as long as I’ve witnessed the affliction of light washing over your skin like this, as you stand hunched over the pink lip of the sink, scrubbing, Sunday spilling through these small windows of time, lighting up the kitchen like some pancake-flipping ghost, your face has always been peppered with moles. Pray…

O Listener, You know how pleased I can be with the sounds of my own words. But sometimes a prayer comes out half chewed, like a tough crust that sticks in the teeth. Or spat out, the stone from a sour plum. What if my prayer is thin, rote, barren of belief? If so, remind…

They’re on the move again, across the soundless moonlit snow, five deer single file along the narrow trail they deepen night after night with their heart-shaped hooves. Shivering, I watch them. Back in bed, in flannel up to my nose, I listen and listen. In my mind already the pipes have frozen and burst, water…

Wanting to be that place where inner and outer meet, this morning I’m listening to the river inside, also to the river out the window, river of sun and branch shadow, muskrat and mallard, heron, and the rattled cry of the kingfisher. Out there is a tree whose roots the river has washed so often…