Issue 99

Not everything comes back. The rescue dog that bolted out the kitchen door (you joked he didn’t want salvation); memories of how it was before your father left (he said he wasn’t going far, his face expressionless, at least you thought it was); and even Jesus, all of us on earth still waiting here, praying.…

What makes the elegant trogon elegant? Makes us flock to the canyon lands of southeastern Arizona during nesting season for a glimpse of it perched, disinterested, on the branch of an oak or sycamore? Deep brown eyes circled by a thin line of tangerine on a downy black mask. A squat lemon yellow bill. Crown,…

As if the seahorse itself were not improbable enough, its near cousin the leafy seadragon is brilliant yellow with white stripes and long, green, leaf-like appendages trailing in branches from all over its body. Gossamer fins ripple along its back and neck as it floats calmly among the fronds of seaweed and seagrass it resembles,…

Stay for me still life, ceaseless tree, stay. Stay who stays the real, you root of mind, you constant mote. Pruned shoot, sealed board, beam of sudden come back for me, please. Wood you. Say. For me, last possible whole world, for wouldn’t-me still possible to believe, for place stay put, for fruit in fool,…

who’s to say here what is not when the hand firmly grips the bird-light wrist the face facing Eve— her son’s as much as Mary’s— furrowed long and lined on her left Adam’s cloak billows back in the blast of blue air He brings the deep blue behind Him an almond of truth that is,…

There is no shadow of turning here but there are spaces for the dark. Neither does the point vanish—receding toward a horizon of agreement pinned to dancing angels, instead gold instead several visions at once see desk with sharp quills curved to light like the mind on the feet that bear good news

Each face turned toward a face at table leaving always a space for one more. An open door to run through when someone can’t quite make it home on their own. Though the wings work, humans haven’t got them, and it’s hard to converse from heights so, in one hand a staff to lean on.…

The blue wind in Greece has been busy all night. Unable to sleep from its breathing, I sat through black hours on the terrace, watching the wind’s shadow and dance through moving objects— the sway of dark branches and the vacant bodies of left-out clothing billowed on an unseen line. At dawn, the wind turned…

IN HIS BOOK The World Beyond Your Head, Matthew Crawford talks about what he calls “ecologies of attention”—the social infrastructure that shapes and channels the way we attend to the world. In an earlier age, quiet spaces cultivated the sort of attention that freed you up to read War and Peace. In the frantic ecology that…

CAROLYN THEODORE BURTANSKI stood in nothing but her socks and underpants and stared at the white smoke spilling its way up the wall of her storage closet. The smoke came out in burps and trickles, liquid-like, rising along a thick gray wire toward an electrical box. At first sight, awe rose in her heart, which…