The birds are still negotiating, defending their territory,
or just playing with sound and breath. From where I walk
it all sounds like beauty. Plenty of light even now in the open.
Fireflies in the trees. The labyrinth is empty, as it usually is.
K. confessed at dinner that she lost patience and walked
straight out, and I laughed because I did too, the day before.
I made all the turns but found them tedious. I put a few
stray stones back in line. Swallows looped over the grass.
Is there any redemption for the Roy family or the Rose family?
A philosophy professor races through a (predetermined?) action plot
How were we able to drink up the sea?
—Nietzsche
Patrick McGrath Muñiz’s art knocks you off balance. It tests or mocks your religious sensibilities. In Cruz y Ficcion(es), for example, he’s replaced the label above the head of the Crucified One with “FREEMAN,” with the letters F-E-M-A popping out. Christ is nailed to a partially destroyed electrical post. The border features paper towels and other items the Federal Emergency Management Agency might be expected to supply after a disaster. FEMA notably failed in responding to Hurricane Maria, which devastated Puerto Rico last year.
Twenty-four seven in “the six days world,”
In endless cycles of unnerving news,
Relentlessly our restless hurts are hurled
Through empty cyber-space. Is there no muse
To make of all that pain an elegy,
Or in those waves of white noise to discern
Christ’s inner cantus firmus, that deep tone
That might give rise at last to harmony?
Matt and Adam welcome Brennan Breed to talk apocalypse, transhumanism, and Terminator 2: Judgment Day.
“Ernest did the honors for the burros this Christmas pageant. He did all
right at the Methodist dress rehearsal but when the big moment came and
the church full of Methodists, he wouldn’t put his foot inside the door.”
—Flannery O’Connor
Peter rides his bike into the morning.
Today he flies through the forest
early enough for the deer to emerge,
watching him and thinking how odd a being
wears cloth over pale skin, and a helmet,
who sits atop wheels that propel him
into their shaded space.
The doe stops to look at his freckled arms
before rustling back into the trees.
The crunch of twigs as she bounds away,
her hooves a polished weight, echo.
Time for them is only light through their eyelids.
Before they fully awake
they are chasing across the lawn of the inn.
It’s 5:30 a.m.
We hear their fur
against our grass-level window glass.
They brush against our lives.
The mother has placed dead moles like Easter eggs
around the grass, and they practice hunting,
flinging gray bodies like toys, nosing
them into the air. Death is play.
Extravagant, the mother’s tail is like the collars of coats
she has no knowledge of.