Issue 111

Stillness is hard. This is going to take practice.

Diego always called me mija, daughter, instead of Lisa. Once he called me by his ex-wife’s name, and ever since, he always called me mija. I thought he might have forgotten my name altogether, but he had his pride, and I took care not to embarrass him.

Star-eater, you said / nothing when I asked; / you couldn’t hear me / with my mouth pressed

How many forms can the wind take? / A paper bag, a dying voice, a limping stray.

Here flints / / sleep next to tinder, matches near the stove.

He plunged into more and different living beings beneath the river’s surface, also uncaring. Almost-blind fishes swimming between reeds, above rusted cans and keys and teeth and bones.

One recalls the depths of shadow, / The uncertain elsewhere of each room, / Dust like stellar remnants drawn together.

Who would just leave a baby Jesus out / In their front lawn for anyone to take?

After Don dried his eyes again, he felt one last burst of laughter, then calm. His mother and Viv felt it, too. Their faces relaxed. Finally, trouble left them and there was more to see.

Five thousand miles of wind and unbounded / / main arrested and framed as a square— / something the size of something / / knowable, even known.

I have carried down the city of you / the continent the fields of corn the fields of you

I have carried down the city of you / the continent the fields of corn the fields of you

I’m crowdsourcing these skills from local weavers and the older women in my family—my grandmothers and aunts—who are now scattered all over the world. They’re sharing stories of various such beds they’d woven or inherited and sending videos and patterns over WhatsApp.

Lie beside me in this fallowland / / crossed through with tramps’ tracks wandering / lost at even these short spans

The heaviness of the questions I was trying to answer demanded a slower pace than photography alone could give me. I began sewing plant material from the farm into prints, and when I put the results in my scanner bed, I discovered that they became illuminated in unique ways, transformed into cosmic-looking abstractions.

The musical metaphors and techniques here surpass a simple recitation of the creed, in part because the music is doing something deeply trinitarian, and you don’t need music theory to feel this in your body.

I’ll tell you what / a proverb does. A proverb waits / for the knowing / / animal. A proverb talks / when no / one listens.

Becoming involved in a poem, allowing the lines to unfold, not knowing if there’s going to be a surprise, a turn, or deepening—this is very similar to being with a patient or family as a chaplain when I don’t have all the answers. Part of my job is to sit with them in uncertainty. It’s a big white space.

I like to be a little cold what / / I mean is I need to feel just / uncomfortable enough to know I’m still / alive

It is said that a certain woman went to visit her sister. Before she knocked, she peeked through the curtain and witnessed something she had never seen.

Three hours, midday: state minimum. / Three hours, midday: the god and her child deep in the forest.

The syllables of my beloved are sweeter / than the cherry yogurt that once brimmed / these cups, her clavicle sturdier than corncobs, / her skin fairer than papery onion skins.

The soundtrack alternates between David speaking about his mother’s life and his memories of her, and a voiceover narration in which Flora recalls her life in Paris. However, a viewer can only watch one side of the screen at a time—either Flora’s or David’s.

I have often said that contemporaneity—much like modernity and creativity—does not belong to one race, place, or economy.

When it comes to commemoration, / the great advantage of sculpture/ is how it tends to outlast / not only what happened / but everything surrounding it, / suggesting a context / is that which rots away.

I mourn again my wrong belief / that evil can ignite the arrival of good

In ballet class they were always chiding us to not allow the difficulty of the act to be expressed in the hands… We girls were being taught the art of concealing art, ars est celare artem, the method wherein obfuscation becomes a weft to gird the warp of technique.

I set you children a lesson, Mary says. Our unknown is I am.

Let me be clear: I desire you / as a body desires a body. As a fern / / bends toward the window, night & day.

It’s taken me / almost a decade to admit it: I miss. I’ve missed / feeding all my thoughts through that revolving blade / so thin it could only be felt.

Duplex isn’t a disenchanted world, where saints have been replaced by stonemasons. It’s not even a world where belief in the soul has been replaced by the fact of robots. It’s a hinged world, a duplex world, where the human and the cosmic, the soul and the stars, stand side by side.

Smoothed for gripping is not for resisting what would / you resist: wood of which you are made you must be / inside of:

So you would rather be sleepy tomorrow, / says husband. Do not believe / it works that way

Because nearing what one wants, / Our intellect is so overcome / That our memory is left behind.

I’m carrying into the cold / a bulging trash bag, big enough to hold / and hold and stretch and hold, like love itself, /
and outfitted with handy drawstrings.