Issue 79

I’m reading The Little Flower on the train out of London: a book that says we can only do small things with great attention. Next to me, a suited, stiletto-heeled commuter hides her title. But when she leaves for coffee, I look. Chapter one: Focus on your core genius now! Reject rejection! Sort out incompleteness—Now!…

Julia Spicher Kasdorf is the author of three poetry collections—Sleeping Preacher (1992), Eve’s Striptease (1998), and Poetry in America (2011)—all from the University of Pittsburgh Press. Sleeping Preacher won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize and the Great Lakes College’s Association Award for New Writing, and Eve’s Striptease was named one of the top twenty poetry books of 1998 by Library Journal. She has…

Where only my scar line remains, a red rose blooms. Luscious, full, so open that if it dropped a single petal, it would not be as lovely as it is this very moment. My eyes watch through the rose’s flaming center, crimson, as if through a hundred desiring eyes— till the world prisms: quartz pink,…

grief and triumph were one and perennial, petals on the same rose, or the same rose by other names. —Kelly Cherry When Rachel was dying, and too weak any longer to sit up when visitors, crying, came to say their last goodbyes, she listened to her friend Deb’s prayers, whispered over the hospital bed. Then,…

Ya-Quddus One of the ninety-nine names of God Yours is the name of God that comes most easily to me— God holy, pure, perfect as geometry, that which is set apart. God to whom I pray, though I deserve no favors. And would you, Ya-Quddus, whom I simply call God, Lord, bargain with my heart…

Night shift on Rine #4 with three thousand feet of drill pipe churning Oklahoma rock, the mud pump’s wheeze and suck, hammer of warped deck plates beneath my boots as I gaze from the rig’s north end upon treeless, dust-bowl no man’s land. The moon slithers under clouds that go all sullen and spread a…

THAT YEAR IN INDIANA, June landed like a fire arrow. It was surprising, and—for the immediate avenue it opened with those strangers who demanded interaction with Jan in the grocery line or at the gas pump—a relief. She knew she could sigh a little, wag her head as if asked to bear a great and…

Little cherub, do you not fly? Or have you landed here in clothing of light To fool the eye? If I hear you in my heart Are you not alive? What I cannot touch I feel I cannot know And yet I know you are in my knowing If knowing is a body, does it…