This morning as the white fog clears
I count the budding, lime-green fruit.
This July will mark five years.
Your sister’s well. She’s changed careers.
Your younger sister’s thriving too.
This morning as the white fog clears,
Do you know? Can you hear?
I launched a book to good reviews.
This July will mark five years.
I keep a strand of your blonde hair,
your Warwick bass, your book of Yeats.
This morning as the white fog clears,
Long solitude is a gradual
drawing inward, going deeper,
like autumn bulbs
snuggling into the soil,
marinating in darkness.
When the isolation ends,
do not hurry the process.
First the shy, green shoot,
then the tentative tip
of a fragile stalk arises
to carry a bud opening
slowly, in its own time.
“Genderqueer and non-conformist are two of my roots,” writes Ansastasio Wrobel (known in the art world as aung robo) in their recent artist statement. “The former being a newly-worded shorthand for my identity and the latter, the original and the one that resonates most deeply.” These roots are in constant interplay throughout their artwork. Each painting forms a kind of visual record of that engagement: testing and changing lines, dragging paint across canvas, repainting, bringing in different media.
Daniel Vaca details the marriage of missionary zeal and financial reward.
The dystopian novel feels about 15 minutes away from becoming reality.
How unpromising you seemed:
frostbitten, forlorn, blanketed in snow.
Dead leaves humped and left to rot
in a forgotten corner of the garden
where you had feasted summerlong
on sun and rain.
With what reckless hope I carried you
to a dark and silent space inside;
caressed your withered brown and peeling skin,
your pale and gravid bulb
neck-deep in soil,
half believing that the dead return.
I am familiar with this should not be.
Although I’ve tried to brush it off, its stench
of weariness and fault and lethargy
comes off my skin, runs from my veins; it’s drenched
in accusation, and tastes like shame. I see
it etched upon my neighbors’ faces, the loud
refrain: This should not be. This should not be.
And yet it masks itself in something proud.
Start with the thin wisp
of hope some stranger hocked
in a hospital room while you waited—
heart pressed to chest—for your father
to die. Breathe in. Decades have skipped
to this beat with someone else dipping hope’s
thread into the tiny creek at your wrist,
your fear swimming upstream to the damaged
cavern you inherited. Breathe out. Papa, I hear
your rhythm, the hum of deceptive rest,
the steady syllables of persistence.
What will hope find with its tiny eye,
The music gets people in the door. Yolanda Norton’s preaching might be what sticks to their bones.
Few biblical narratives deal with separation from God and from others in so vivid a way as the story of Jonah in the belly of the great fish, depicted in this wood panel painting by Lyuba Yatskiv. Yatskiv belongs to a circle of Ukrainian Greek Catholic artists from the city of Lviv in western Ukraine who are revitalizing the ancient art of icon making. They create their holy images using traditional techniques in a style that resonates with modern viewers. An anxiety-ridden Jonah dominates this claustrophobic, cruciform composition, but he is framed by depictions of liberation.