A Conversation with Sam Phillips
By Interview Issue 60
In 1987, three years after Harper’s heralded her as the “Queen of Christian Rock,” Leslie Phillips sang these words: “You lock me up / with your expectations / Loosen the pressure you’ve choked me with / I can’t breathe.” That song appeared on an album called The Turning, and the title spoke of her decision…
Read MoreAnniversary
By Poetry Issue 60
1. February 2, 2008: Learning the Rosary Birth is the first affliction but there is no birth. Birth is the beginning of endless affliction ending finally in dying but there is no death. This has never been explained to me in words, but mutilations. I watch you watching something from the window and smiling in…
Read MoreParsonage with Two Maples
By Poetry Issue 60
I. In unvarnished foreground, a cat offers his paw in a dingy splint to children who bend over it, one in a red, zipped-up jacket so the whole scene is drawn away from the fields, the church where someone’s arranging flowers in deep, dented vases (we can’t see any of this but her parked car,…
Read MoreThe Name of God
By Poetry Issue 60
Like a baker, swaddling the juice and heft of apples in pastry, I want my mouth to cradle the delicious name of God. Kissing the Torah, I breathe the dust that has lain on the name of God, imagine ink on my indrawn breath. I will dream myself into the body of a bee. I…
Read MoreThe Burned Butterfly
By Poetry Issue 60
Thus this restless little butterfly of the memory has its wings burned now and cannot fly. —Teresa of Avila Char my wings. Lord, singe these cells of forewing, hindwing. Blacken memory’s sky blue shimmer, its thousands of cells— each startling pigment, each dorsal and ventral venation— the coppered glint of flight, oh Lord. If prayer…
Read MoreMedieval Miniatures: The Entombment
By Poetry Issue 60
from The Book of Hours, 1440 The painter has left a whole corner empty, squeezed the painting into the top half of a diagonal. How gently they lay His body, His face crooked from pain. Nicodemus lifts Him below the knees. Joseph of Arimathea fixing the shoulders to rest, his chin holding Christ’s haloed head…
Read MoreMedieval Miniatures: Entry into Jerusalem
By Poetry Issue 60
Someone always climbs a tree When a saint arrives—half- Way marker of earth and sky: You can’t get there from here. But this is how we represent Desire for liberation, human form As flag announcing spirit through Flesh. That boy reaches for a bird or palm, The top part of the tree where branches break…
Read MoreSudden Death
By Poetry Issue 60
I I am looking for the letter that arrived after Uncle Sol’s death. The one that says: The war is over! Love to Kayla, X-O-X. I even searched back through the cardboard box, opening each envelope in precise reverse order— sorry for the lapse between this missive and the last— watching their lives drawing closer…
Read MoreAnother Holocaust Poem
By Poetry Issue 60
I I watch them enter, lined up, ark-like, two by two, chatting quietly, and after the teacher, counting, passes, one pushes and the one pushed begins the chase. This is how the orphans marched through Warsaw in 1942, I tell the behaved ones, orderly and under orders, and I’m just about to start that terrible…
Read MoreBystander
By Poetry Issue 60
I watched him fall and rise upon that hill, heard his call as he released his ghost. I never dreamed civility would damn me. I was like others, a man of honor with a wife who wanted peace of mind by nightfall, children who needed discipline, routine. I could not be a revolutionary, abandon what…
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