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James Ault’s new documentary offers a window into a vast and exciting musical world.

Agere contra.  —Ignatius of Loyola

God isn’t love or isn’t God. This is,
For doubt, its royal flush: God can’t be both.
I’m caught up in the logic and the mood,
Hemmed in by facts, one fact, the world’s abyss
Of suffering and injustice, how it’s loath
To love: no God or else one far from good.

Sitting Pretty showed me how much I have to learn about ableism.

“The best place to be is at the intersection of art and faith.”

“Tiny bees found in woman’s eye, feeding off tears” (CNN, April 10,
2019): “She thinks the insects blew into her eye at a relative’s grave
site when she visited it with her family.” Known as sweat bees, they
are attracted to the salt in human sweat.

Stranger than it appears,
four bees living off her tears
sought brief shelter in her eye
where they stayed, impossibly.

Before whose grave did she kneel?
What discomfort did she feel?
Specks of dirt she’d brushed away
seemed to linger stubbornly.

As the series drifts, it mimics the drift of the monarchy itself—and of other institutions.

Kao Kalia Yang’s collective memoir conveys their diversity—and their singular humanity.

The therapist says to sit with your loneliness
and so I sit in the middle of my apartment,
walls of boxes around me, clothes
still lodged in trash bags two months in.
I think of how everything is a metaphor
for acceptance. Brush past the feeling
but do not face it yet. The therapist tells me
that everything is a repetition, but I take it
to mean that every minute is a chance
to relive losing. So I practice driving
slower than the speed limit, letting
the night enter through the open windows.

Can these bones live? The answer to this question posed to the prophet Ezekiel seems painfully obvious in such a macabre setting, depicted in this mixed media collage by Cody F. Miller as a place of skull heaped on skull, where all hope is lost. In one of the great reversal narratives of the Bible, Ezekiel’s visionary vista of desolation and destruction undergoes an astonishing transfiguration.

Isaac without spot or blemish
about to be slain lay
there
before Him

trussed up, in trust

his father’s arm poised
the death angel
hovering near, thoughts

racing, fear of

the known, and the unknown;
but neither squirm, nor blanch
did I see
in Him pinioned there, nary

a tremble in His lips

while He looked upon
His stabat mater . . .

While

to me He whispered His
job-like words

:  though He may kill Me
   yet will I