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Jordan Kisner writes about seeing the world and the self.

for W. H. Auden

     Creator Spirit, Come I bellow as Herr Beer
     picks up our slim offerings
                             “Whitsunday in Kirchstetten”

Some days, when my brother’s death
weighs heavily, I imagine his midnight
visit to my mother, appearing right
in the hallway door beside her bed
all smiles, arms outstretched as in: I’m fine.
She notices he’s wearing the brown jacket
she’d dry-clean each winter so he could pack
lightly on his trip home. Each time

For weeks afterward, photos zing at you, children
weeping in another language, peering into doorways
to find their parents, children gnawing on gristle,
who scrunch up, crouch down, hoping to escape the cages.
A toddler grips her mother’s red skirt just before guards
wrench her hand and split the two apart. The polite voice
of a lost kindergartner repeats the cell number of her auntie
over and over, what she has practiced for months
in a language strange to her: you will want to call her

Autumn Brown and adrienne maree brown explore the end of the world as we know it.

Catholic painter Alfonse Borysewicz often takes inspiration from scriptural passages and liturgical rites. He has created an impressive body of work that hangs not only in galleries and private collections but in churches, monasteries, and seminaries from Brooklyn to Grand Rapids, Michigan. In this work, the background is formed from shredded musical scores. The requiem, traditionally played at a funeral mass, here takes on physical form, as if rent and stained by ash like a mourner’s garments.

—a mystery or secret doctrine, Strong’s Concordance

She—dark eyebrows, inky eyes,
raven hair, olive skin—bakes as her family
works in the fields daydreaming

about that bearded man
under their ketubah . . . so handsome!                   
but exiling such thoughts she
reaches for flatbread toasting in a pan