Issue 85

This tall fern has a midrib so sturdy I can pluck its broad width of green and wave it before my face as I walk the lane, the gnats and the deerflies shooed pell-mell as the air ripples away from my body. I’m no longer a target. Do this enough, in three million years I’ll…

Stars and the sun are not eternal. They flare. They wither. The earth and its high mountains, its tors and spires, aspen groves, scarred and broken bristlecone pines, torrential blizzards, are not eternal.                                            Rivers and seas change courses, alter shores, appear, dwindle, vanish. The rampant floras, birds, reptiles, and mammals of tropical forests…

All action, it leaps, faster than the eye can follow, from treetip to trestle tower, from cedar roof to harvested fields, cartwheels and spins, leaps again and attacks, slithering up dead oaks and dry junipers, captures, holds close, strangles, suffocates all mouth in its consumption, gulping and swallowing entire acres of sere and withered stalks,…

Most lie low, flourishing with damp, harvesting sunlight, no commotion, moss mouse-silent, even through wind and hail, stoic through motors roaring fumes, through fat-clawed bears grubbing. They can soothe the knife-edges of stones with frothy leaf by leaf of gray-green life, and burned-ground mosses cover destruction, charred stumps, trees felled and blackened. Cosmopolitan mosses likewise…

MY DEAREST KATIE, Do you remember that evening we flew together from Burlington in Vermont to Saint Paul in Minnesota? Do you remember how the wind came in off Lake Champlain and cut through the streets of Burlington like a sawblade, the snow blistering somewhere out over the lake? We flew just ahead of the…

JODI AND I WERE PLAYING the Ravel. Her parents had been texting her for almost an hour, and though Jodi was ignoring them with a theatrical nonchalance, I knew it was only a matter of time before they tried my apartment. Not that they would get anywhere. For days now, my mother and I had…

It is difficult to find a language in which faith and science can speak to each other. For some, faith and science are competing systems of thought, and an intellectually responsible person must make a choice between them, especially when it comes to questions about the origins and development of life. For others, faith and…