—-—She now wanders at large to the notorious peril to her soul. In the likeness of her body she created the dummy. In the image of God, male & female He created them. She placed her heart in its small cavity. In sickness she heard Him call to her—— in a dream her sweat, the bed, she said I am here. Here, she said, pretending to be dead in her body. She created the dummy, no longer thinking or seeing——no longer hearing,—— his body on hers in that determined way—the way of carnal lust, he said. Sh...

Chicago 2020 Each day you wake to the same gray sky,snow covering the grass like scarves the women wearat church to make their beautymore bearable for the angels and the sons of men.The city sleeps even more than it usually does during winter—lights dimmed, the empty skyscrapers monumentsto a life we’ve nearly forgotten, now. Time slows.Stops. You smooth gel into your hairand pick out fresh clothes to wear for your tripto the couch, the chair in your office, the kitchen, with itsbowl of citru...

I wish to praise what is fully alive,What longs to flame toward death.      —Goethe, “Blessed Longing”   Longing, the deserted beach, smell of woodsmokeand poems in a mystery of leaves— the apple about to fall from the tree. It’s another kind of beginning,calendar of spirit and of sight, day turning into night—a prophecyfor release and spark. The healing of our broken hearts. We’re neither sinners nor saintsbut something in between—balance of the light and dark as these lengthened dayscontract,...

We are continuously drifting apart. It can’t be helped. When we come together our edges seem to fit, but there’s always a space between, even when it can’t be seen. Here, the evidence is clear: the river of black sand where the stones have worn down – volcanic rocks rising on each side of the rift, jagged grooves a laceration. Wound. What we say or don’t say – raising our voices over the lava-scarred plane. There are no trees to stand in the way, no throng of bush or cloud to bloc

Deacon Nkosi, a member of the church, told the newspaper, “The pastor taught us about faith on Sunday last week.” Crocodiles can’t survive in the sewer no matter what your grandmother says as she phones from Florida where the rain has flooded even the first floor of her fantasy retirement village lifestyle rec- reation room pool court shuffle off to Buffalo board & your mistake was that you lacked a boat to focus on as you stepped out onto the surface which you thought had ha

We go about our daily lives understanding almost nothing about the world: her arms, the black and white flowers, heavenly bodies in the sky. This is my brief history of happiness: someone loved me once, though my body was already learning the grave – the flesh, the stench of my mouth in the morning when I spoke of the so-called fixed stars attest to this. In the photo leaning, I’m falling, the gravity of the situation impossible to measure, the lace of her dress barely brushing

I have bought 5 yoke of oxen to mow the unruly hair of the dead body out back where the vultures gather: leaves from last year’s disappointment, the stumps that refuse digging and flogging and all other forms of affection. If I put my arms around the tallest oak and kiss the dark root, eat the splinter bark that splits the tongue. If I lay down in the field and turn my eye to branch and sky. Oh taste and see that the tree is good and lives deeper beneath than ab

When the music started everyone knew what to do but me, at the edge of the crowd my half-shuffle wanting   to raise my hands in the air like I just didn’t care about the next big thing, the emails and texts, those   miracle machines they say Jesus doesn’t need. When he came down from the balcony everyone could see   his white teeth and billowing hair, the disco pants, his boots against the stair, and the song changed   ah-ah-ah-ah stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive

In Basic Disaster Supplies Kit, her second collection, Marci Rae Johnson explores love, parenthood, and the Christian life in the context of life on-line, reveling in the Internet’s speed, distortion, and telescoping of time and space. Her poems absorb and transform distant galaxies, potential catastrophes, world clocks, crowds at rock concerts, and, in one case, an image gone viral on the Internet. It makes a big difference, of course, when your powers are magnified a thousand-fold. No more so