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The evening after protests in Turin, Italy, Tempio Industriale—artist Valerio Perino—gathers tear gas canisters from the city streets. He creates artwork from urban refuse, from items that symbolize the environments that contain, discard, or deploy them. He reflects to viewers a materialism of the Western world: the detritus of buildings, the symbols of policing. From metal scraps found on city streets and in abandoned factories Tempio Industriale brings together fraught symbols to draw attention to humanity.

. . . my soul cries for You, O God (Ps. 42:2)

yearning
for streams of water
in the desert
of the Word
I stalk
the voice
where once
all was
but the Word
till it became flesh
and nary a Name
to be found

As Easter Sunday approaches, Matt and Adam talk about violence, resurrection, and the 2012 James Bond film Skyfall.

The diagnosis.
The C9orf72 gene.
The telling, the children, the mother.
The hiking stick, the cane, the rolling walker.
The lift chair, the gait belt, the ramps.
The hospital bed.
The power wheelchair banging the door jambs.
The reclining shower chair, the Hoyer lift.
The oxygen concentrator, the baby monitor.
The G-tube, the kangaroo pump.
The Medicaid machine.
The hospice nurse.
The grinding, the measuring.
The changing of sheets in the night.
The pointing at letters of the alphabet.

Poet Molly McCully Brown’s memoir of life with cerebral palsy

Being born is a holy calling to join God in free, joyful, and playful expression.

—with a prayer from Cymbeline

An odd, charming gospel account that draws from dozens of sources

Who knows why the fledglings died—
slowly—lingering even now in the nest
built in the clothespin bag hanging from
a nail on the porch while the frantic
parents sing forth their lament.

Was it the cramped contours of the bag
bristling with wooden pins, or our evening
presence on the porch, or the early laying
of six small eggs in this long cold spring
of frigid nights.

I love ordinary piety,
rosaries, hausmadonnas in their niches,
anonymous shrines alongside ditches,
Mary visions, cults, sobriety
ancient, feral, rude. Motherly,
I bless, cradle, grieve. I’m shown wearing
lilies, roses, thorns . . . angels bearing
me on clouds, on a snake—otherly
real, not upheld by scholarship, but fresh,
gut. Michelangelo and Fra
Lippo Lippi believed. Their art is raw
with it. I bleed. I’m a thing of flesh.
I wear all costumes, every deathbed wake.