Votive objects, religious relics, timeworn crucifixes, and fragments of funerary sculptures appear frequently in the work of Paez Antonio. The artist from Cadiz, Spain, is an archaeologist of the human memory; he follows fellow Spaniards Francisco Goya and Pablo Picasso in his fascination with memento mori.
Where ice-melt ran yesterday,
grass bends flat. Violet leaves
like green hearts spring up again,
relieved of pressure.
Out of soft earth, a blossom
comes forward. Moss crawls tree trunks,
new emerald skin.
I used to think of you as an arrow
of fire, or as a sharp wind
full of sand. Flinching,
I braced to meet you.
Now, as stems spring up again
and ground gives way underfoot,
I hold you in my hand where you tremble
like the round, brown body of a dove.
The hawk grips electric wire and waits,
his brown-feathered head as smooth as if
he’d slicked it back this morning with a comb,
the way his keen eyes part the bent weeds
in the run-off ditch beside the road.
He perches on the line, against the stretched spring
blue, like a metaphor ineffable and wide.
Is he the talon lurking from above that finally
rends us? Or the power that lives beside us, laboring
to lift us with unfolding wings?
Massive struggle, intense suffering, and abundant joy
Tobi Kahn is fascinated by the edges of abstraction. The surfaces of his paintings swell with forms that can appear both macrocosmic and microcosmic, as if depicting the contours of a distant nebula or a cell dividing under a microscope. In 2019, Kahn set himself yet another challenge, taking up the human figure as subject for his paintings and works on paper for the first time in more than 30 years.
Matt and Adam talk about coronavirus, family, church and Edgar Wright's 2004 zombie comedy, Shaun of the Dead.
(from John 11:17–44)
Dead, poor thing: we dreamed of him,
those few days, crying, threshing,
in his stone room—no stories, no songs, his sisters
gone away. —Raised, he capers again
along the goat-tracks, yoohoos from the hills:
but the boys have stopped their tormenting—no fun to it,
him not minding. He lies at night, quiet,
eyes gleaming in the starlight. —Jolt of carcass, lurch
of clotty stenchy blood: to God’s dear fool,
“Life is built, and then it stops, and then Christ reaches in and brings it forward again.”
Will prevent infection, my mother advised.
But when I stepped on nails, wailing from concrete,
she followed those spoonfuls with a tiny jar,
dripping eucalyptus beads for further protection.
Like Saturdays, when my pastor’s husband bakes
Communion loaves in midnight’s sacristy,
humming hymns and molding mysteries, yet
I pray extra blessings the next day as my lips
A Macedonian beekeeper’s ordinary, mythical life