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Small Graces

By Mark Wagenaar Poetry

Red Rock Canyon, Nevada  I’m trying to follow the letters my brother’s toe outlines in the air as he twitches through an invisible alphabet to rehab the frayed ligaments. Pointe work penance for a former fútbol player, as he describes the gentle donkeys last year in Red Rock Canyon, how they nosed his hand, nuzzled…

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For Whom the Resurrection is the Full Moon Rising

By Mark Wagenaar Poetry

Gauzed shine on the infinite, the moondog blooms like a distant searchlight left of the moon, almost unmoving to the naked eye, as if tracking a slow-drifting object, like one of the balloons wafting into North Korea, balloons with winter socks tied to them, or one of Chagall’s ethereal blue bodies above a nameless Russian…

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Far as the Curse is Found: The Art of Scott Kolbo

By Cameron J. Anderson Essay

The prophet is a realist of distances, and it is this kind of realism that you find in the best modern instances of the grotesque.                             —Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners SOME MONTHS AGO, while traveling, I walked full-force into the sloping ceiling of the unfamiliar guest room where I was staying. The blow to…

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As Saint Mark Says They Mustn’t

By Mario Chard Poetry

Then the river I hadn’t found held the rivers I had ransom. I knew I wouldn’t find it. I would leave where I wanted to stay. I was convinced we pay no other price. Then the river I hadn’t found held everything I had. The way belief holds proof so we forget. I could hear…

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Night and Chaos

By Mario Chard Poetry

Once in the desert he said he saw the shape of a man, a body, the line around it neither light nor dark standing speechless in his path. That he could feel his shirt draw back against his body his mind was already giving back to fear until the figure turned to yield and let…

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Tenebrae

By Lindsey Griffin Short Story

CAR HEADLIGHTS from the Miami traffic outside brushed along the upper chapel walls, grazing the stained-glass windows and the cross suspended there. Ever since Esteban and I had entered the Lutheran church on Fifty-Seventh, we’d been silent. I shifted in the pew. Although Esteban had been carting me to youth group all of freshman year, this…

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Byzantine Gold

By Derrick Austin Poetry

A chain of blue-white chips mimics waves pleating around Christ’s body. On the western wall, another scene of owl-eyed saints drawing light unlike us. Despite centuries of votive smoke, the shining ranks of prophets gesture, elegant as sommeliers, toward mosaic scrolls and would have you consider the honeycombed geometry of paradise—dome, arch, and column— it’s…

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Salt Wife

By Amy McCann Poetry

Cured to permanent gown, a mineral seep—all tears, all weep. The lick I am. The lips I’ll crimp in the swap of elements—the more of them, the more I melt. My backdrop old smoke in the shape of tents, my city most flagrant in absence— gutted cavity under the stilted SOS of stars. I have…

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Altricial

By Amy McCann Poetry

What offers a skeletal peep. Feather-smear, mostly gullet—agape for the secondhand upchuck grub, bolus crammed iridescent with carapace and wing. A holiness, this helplessness, the mother’s tireless, kenotic reconnaissance ending every time with her head bent to her nest of tidbit beggars, X-ray translucent, the tinder of their bones radiant beneath. All hollow. The aerate…

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According

By Amy McCann Poetry

In my mouth the name of God an overripe pear: a grain, a grit on the tongue. A grail, all vowel-shaped gaps, like lipping the rim of an empty cup, that low-frequency opening undoing, unhinging the jaw. God’s name as eyetooth, meat-intended, a visible skeletal hint. God as salve for chalk. For the bent heart,…

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