One teasing April day the mad priestapproached a bakery truck and prayedIf that priest is still loosechanging substantially everything he knows how,what if no one overhears? Upon first reading the poem “Wonder Bread,” I remembered a 2010 mock commercial for “Pre-Blessed Food.” It wasn’t filmed and posted to YouTube until eleven years after “Wonder Bread” was published in Image, but it was a cultural cornerstone when I was in middle school. Peers at the…

The shoemaker follows human life by means of the specific experiences that feet lead us through.

Each element in Haven’s poem returns to the visual of childhood games, like hopscotch or tic-tac-toe. The image of boxes containing “Xs and Os” haunts the poem, creating a pattern that compartmentalizes our speaker’s reckoning with the past. This reckoning is “a tally where no one / should ever win.” The poem speaks to a…

Todd Davis’s poetic imagination is steeped in the natural world. “First Kiss” demonstrates this as much as any poem possibly could. The poem describes a childhood courtship, every action of which either involves elements of nature or is seen in terms of them. This begins with the poem’s very first words: the girl sounds like…

Anyone who’s visited a city far from daily familiars—surrounded by new language, customs, landscapes, and cuisine—knows how the senses seem on high alert, including our acknowledgment that we inhabit a physical body attempting to maneuver all of the above with grace and even confidence. Here, Jean Janzen’s speaker revisits a romanticized location known for its…

In examining her simple subject, Bohince expands the scope of an egg. The poem’s title, “The Egg of Anything” lets the egg become the root and symbol of large and small images: “sun and moon mixed,” or “little o / in hope or love.” Bohince’s descriptions radiate through her abstract comparisons and playful word choices…

This poem is a meditation on Leonardo da Vinci’s famous painting, “The Last Supper.” But the meditation moves in an unexpected direction. The first stanza stays with the painting, though with a comical interpretation of “torn bread” scattered on the tablecloth. In stanza two, the poet moves to the wine—“or seeming / lack of it.”…

This poem draws me in with its opening sounds: “Midnight, mid-May.” With those urgent, humming Ms, we are situated in a lush environment thick with potential, growth, and energy. Midnight is a hidden time, an hour when reader and speaker should be asleep. Instead, in this poem we stand alert to a late spring night…

The spring equinox was on Monday. I am slowly seeing a flush of new life around me, like plum tree blossoms and nettles, while winter’s dank decay is still lamentably present. Christian Wiman’s haunting and tender poem “Love’s Last” from his collection Once in the West (originally published in Image issue 81) echoes loudly for…

Recently, I have been reading The Very Busy Spider by Eric Carle with my 16-month old daughter. In this story (which we have read many times now) the spider is diligent and focused, despite many distractions, and at the end of this very busy day she completes her masterful web. Spiders have always fascinated me,…