Issue 37

  • Issue 37,  Poetry

    After the Renaissance

    by Stuart Sheppard

    We have lost the ability to see what the ancients saw,
    as we no longer look at the world in candlelight.

    Things are seen too clearly now,
    the way we have washed the dirty gaze of Michelangelo
    from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

    When God holds out his hand to us
    we like to count the fingers,
    instead of leaning forward into the warmth of his palm,

    like a cat seeking the heat of our flesh at night,
    remembering its birth in darkness.

  • Hybrid,  Issue 37

    Home Church Gets Weird

    art by the author

    by Erin Allen


    AND ON THE SEVENTH DAY       of my husband’s business trip, my son asks why we haven’t
    been to church in forever, but Lord, I am not ready to go into it, especially with my partner
    halfway around the world, so I tell the kids we’re gonna do church at home. I pull out the
    Children’s Bible, read the one about three wise men, only I change it to three wise
    people because I want so badly for the book to be inclusive that I’ll change the story to get us there.

  • Issue 37,  Poetry

    Third Shift

    by Elizabeth Pope

    painting by the author

     

     

    You took a night class, 3D design with the intent to get out of the house
    to meet people and make something, to move your mind off the ceiling
    watermarks baring the maps of escape, fissures leaking
    the silhouette of Alaska.
                                                    Left your husband
                                                    and daughter, bottled breastmilk in the deep freeze.

    Your hair was longer then, and you always worried it might catch fire
    as you solder-ironed a book out of steel strips
    the size of toothpicks,

  • Issue 37,  Poetry

    Jam

    photo by Vasily Kleymenov on pexels

    by Samn Stockwell

    A cockroach takes a sip of night, stirs
    by the highway where a mouse
    prods bits of chips in a red wrapper.

    I’m hanging on the guardrails
    of the overpass, on a thin crumble
    of sidewalk – below

    the turn of the streetcar waddling back,
    a guitar player rumbling his hand up the frets,
    and the moon over the amplitude
    of a horn blowing the last note.


    Samn Stockwell has published in Agni,
  • Issue 37,  Poetry

    Folktale #333

    by Jaye Nasir

    photo by Ricardo Lima on pexels

    In the dark woods. In the dark
    woods at night. It was
    a dark and stormy night. There
    was a girl. There she was, among
    the willows. Among the open mouths
    of the trillium flowers.
    It was a girl, the woods. A dark
    and stormy girl. This girl she was
    a woods. The tallest tree: her mother.

    To make an index of every folktale
    defeats the purpose. The point
    of a story is: you cannot catch it.

  • Issue 37,  Poetry

    The Falling

    photo by Henry & Co. on pexels

    by Michael Olson

    (After Theodore Roethke’s “The Waking”)

    I fall to rise and take my falling fast.
    I feel myself in things I hope to know.
    I learn by holding those that never last.

    I feel by thinking how to hold my past.
    I know myself by what I need to sow.
    I fall to rise and take my falling fast.

    To those who know a part of me, you asked:
    Where are you going?