Poetry
Illustration by Sue Gent
Sunday, he emerges carrying blue iris,
lilies, and maidenhair ferns,
a few cabbage palm fronds,
shears closing their silent beaks
the light just disclosed behind the river hill,
boxwood and red peeled trunks of crepe myrtles.
He picks and chooses, gathers them in his arms,
he will push the iron gate and climb the serpentine brick path.
He pitched semi-pro baseball,
golfer, lifeguard, fencing master,
a life to the body, works of reflexes,
eyes of a blue cutting-edge, deft hands, perfect ambidextrous,
slant ball, whirled ball, knee ball. He catches all.
He embraces the flowers against his chest
and deposits them by the altar,
signs himself, arranges them in a white vase.
No ball to miss.
God and prayers, fragrant Easter between his two luminous hands.
Illustration by Bernard Leonardo
Fear turns me into a tree.
Every pruning healed
becomes an eye.
Sunlight plays the leaves,
each a pool of green incandescence,
a window to the heart.
Every wound a hieroglyph.
Each whisper a new chord.
Come inside my radiant dream:
a phoenix fruit ripens unseen.
Illustration by Vartika Sharma
I once believed I could hate intermittently,
an incandescence I could turn on and off
with the will or guide with the pressure
of my knees or with reins woven
from the clear demands of the moment.
Illustration by Haley Jiang
I was welcomed home by the me
I’d always tried to be—
more rainbow than thunderclap,
no more worry-do-worry-do.
Illustration by Ric Carrasquillo
Surely I betrayed her at least three times:
eighteen months of bone-grinding hip pain,
a list of life stories never recorded, and
leaving her exposed to suffering because
I didn’t know. I didn’t know it was so hard to die.
The cock’s crow was just basic kidney physiology,
Illustration by Laura Freeman
For Elijah McClain (1996-2019). Killed by police in Aurora, Colo., he was known as a gentle soul who played his violin to soothe anxious animals in shelters.
If only a violin could redeem
the world.
Your skin, glowing like the violin’s wood,
might still sing its humble lament.
Illustration by Hokyoung Kim
The electric fence is low,
and the coyotes many
this verdant year,
this jubilee when farmers
change their signs
from demands we
PRAY FOR RAIN
to THANK YOU LORD.
Illustration by Nate Sweitzer
Dream fragment in which Thomas Merton stops his Jeep
at the border, where a customs official who looks like my sister
opens his suitcase and, finding a spare monastic robe,
Illustration by Ric Carrasquillo
Dome of the rock
dome of the belly
every diaphragm
its own firmament
waters above
from waters below
eyeglasses flecked with salt spots
remnants of our oceans
llustration by Danzhu Hu
Lisa Montgomery, the first woman killed by the U.S. federal government since 1953, was executed under former President Trump.
Red roses blooming all at once
when she finds between herself and any door
a male, be him grandson or lawyer, any flinch of any him brings a springtime
terror of thorn and attar, shivering with adrenaline, a clawing
of petal-flesh, the past beneath it, the blood
un-forgetting,
Illustration by Rachel Joan Wallis
When I decapitated the sunflowers today, the birds had already
pecked them mostly bald. I sawed through those thick necks with
silver shears, squash leaning to cup falling petals and black seeds in her
green palms. I was cutthroat, ripping this food from the garden. I knew
how fierce and warlike the small wrens had become, and, sure enough,
there were the fearless nails in my scalp, clawing for my soul.
Illustration by Kat Ash
I like my anger. I stoke it
like a fire, tend to it
with tender hands, cup
a hand ’round as I
blow to fan the flames
Illustration by Ric Carrasquillo
This spring, we’ll gather for a third time
since we first lost our forebears, martyrs to a cause
they did not choose for themselves.
Beloved grandmothers spent their last nights alone
in crowded hospital rooms while officeholders
deliberated over the what, not the what now or the how.