Issue 71

Luc Olivier Merson, 1897 When the deer appeared in the yard, I was slicing tomatoes for dinner, the knife ringing the plate with each slice, but the deer hear everything, so I stopped. The husband saw them too. It’s the end of summer, he said to me, in my head. We saw the female deer…

In the white of the yard the snow provides, they arrived, making form seem careless dream while they fed. From their sentences (like guides) I know they swung back hoof to front, to seem to letter selves through white in slow confessions. I want to know the faith they’re lurching toward. Something like faith in…

Forgive them, for they don’t know what they do. Blood, veins, infinity, the garden, your words in metaphor: the whole story rises dark blue in the trees’ green burdens, drenched with voice. Blood, veins, infinity, the garden, your words all dissolve, like the story itself, to myth in the trees. Green burdens drenched with voice…

  ONE WILL ROSS NOVEL was a bestseller in the sixties, another earned six figures after its advance and brought in a few hundred each year, but hardly anybody read his twenty-some books anymore, and when he was invited to the odd conference in South Dakota or South Carolina, attendees were surprised he was alive and…

The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit. —————————————John 3:8 THE SUMMER OF 1968, though it mourned the recent assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and shuddered at the murder…