Issue 61

For Aciek Arok Deng I leave the camp, unable to breathe, me Freud girl, after her interior, she Lost Girl, after my purse, her face: dark as eggplant, her gaze: unpinnable, untraceable, floating, open, defying the gravity I was told keeps pain in place maybe trauma doesn’t harden, packed, tight as sediment at the bottom…

The spring issue of Image includes Melissa Pritchard’s story of the peculiar and incendiary real-life historical figure Pelagia Ivanovna Serebrennikova, born in 1807 in Arzamass, Russia, one of the eastern churches’ Holy Fools, figures whose wild behavior embodied Saint Paul’s description of the early Christians: “we are made a spectacle unto the world…. We are…

An expert from First Baptist Church in coat and tie came with our class to the Natural History Museum to lead the second grade past the error-filled placards on the walls of the Prehistoric Hall, so we could in innocence admire the skeletons of God’s magnificent extinct creation. I hung back as the class clambered…

Mussoorie, India Lying on the bed below you, I never managed to ask you to pray for us, or to see you weep the blood you’re famous for. I just loved to stare— and you didn’t seem to mind— at your barely blushing cheekbones, lit by the angel’s glow. You warmed me with your incandescent…

  This essay will appear in Jesus Girls: True Tales of Growing Up Female and Evangelical, an anthology from Cascade Books, edited by Hannah Faith Notess. ON THE DAY of my baptism, my father stood at the back of the church—hung-over, or quite possibly drunk even at that early hour—and shouted, “Hooray for Sara!” as…

You must desire Nothing. —————Saint John of the Cross Light glows off the drifts like a child’s long gaze upwards. Only the sky is heavy, a drum full of laundry—white, reluctantly tumbling. I don’t need to look out the window to know how the corners of houses give themselves away, like people who’d do anything…

———————————————–it marked the edge of a circle, split into the raked sky a seam I thought I saw, and given the right atmosphere, would travel through. Do I believe? The sky was widened slightly, as it widens at the tip of threatened churches, and the spire rises higher so the deity is nearer, so can…

Portraits of the Sonata: Desire and Transformation in Modern European Cinema   IN 1984, A MIDDLE-AGED MAN wearing headphones, sequestered away in the attic of an East German apartment building, sits before a typewriter. Around him are the trappings of his profession, the machines and gear that allow him to spy upon events transpiring in…

They sound freshly wounded, weeping their few cracked notes. Lullaby to the fly in the web, the torn gazelle, the Ice Man with grass in his shoes fighting sleep on the glacier. Listen, they chorus. Here is the underlying sorrow of the world. In the belly. In the rock. In the black holes of heaven…

Past sundown you bring me here, my first time inside a mosque. Men sitting cross-legged on the floor beside their teacher briefly look up at us, then turn back, on fire to hear the word. You ramble on in praise of Muslim art, exquisite painted tiles, floral carvings in teak, your speech articulate as a…