They say God won’t let you go under; but it seems he will let your hair get pretty wet. Most trials, if they’re worthy of the name, don’t let you get away without a good scare, maybe even a rent garment and some scratches, if not scars. The less lucky might have to surrender more.…

It’s fairly common for a poem to be inspired by (or be in conversation with) a famous painting. Less often, though, do we find poems engaging with a musical work. Yet that’s just what happens in Carol Davis’s poem “Grief Daybook: A Love Supreme.” Fans of the brilliant jazz saxophonist and composer John Coltrane will…

This is a poem about scale, about the awesome power of the Creator, who in turn gave humanity the power to create. And it’s about the power of a created being, and its potential to do good or evil. Here we have a whale sighting, her powerful fluke useable for constructive or destructive acts—“so many…

Maybe it was instinct that sent me back to relive the 1924 Olympic Games. Yesterday you found me despairing, feeling a sudden collapse of my lifelong will to write. Slumped on the couch, I was watching, of all things, Chariots of Fire. As a child, I loved this movie. But it wasn’t until college that…

When I visit my family in northern Minnesota, I find myself on the same roads I’ve known—back and forth—since I was a child. Often I ride with others because I can’t orient, even in my small town and the outskirts made of barely-there townships and roads that veer only toward themselves. I think of small…

I have a friend who occasionally asks me when I’ll move to a real apartment, meaning a modern one that I can’t afford. Mine is in a 130-year-old former bakery I like to think is haunted by donut ghosts. The building was built on top of an aquifer, and the sump pump thrusts out massive…

Last Sunday I was trying to decide whether to go church or take a walk along the river on a beautiful summer day in my corner of northwestern Washington. Some days I have time to do both and some days, for some justifiable reason, I do neither. The poem “Homily” by Todd Davis is both…

Since birth, the rhythm of my week has been set by church. Both my parents have held leadership positions in the varied churches we have attended over the years. In one of the many commonplaces of the evangelical testimony, I could easily say that I was indeed trained to be in church “every time the…

This is a poem to stretch the mind. It begins by stretching our imagination to a cosmic event: a “moondog,” which is a rare bright spot in the moon’s halo. It’s formed by a “mirage of light & cloud & ice”—an image which then brings the speaker down to earth, into his own life. But…

We stumbled onto the bus in Lisbon, sleepy after the overnight flight from New York. The pilgrimage tour guide handed out rosaries while the priest told the bus driver to play a recording of the rosary prayers on the sound system. I fingered the pink beads, following along with the Hail Marys and Our Fathers.…