The Waking
A Time to be Born
We tear and mend and tear again. We speak and find quiet and speak again. We weep and laugh and weep and laugh again. This is a list of cycles, because seasons are like that.
The Inward Dimension of Fasting
In Islamic understanding, ibadat mean[s] the various services that can be given towards praising God or Allah. I become alive as I pray into the night. I wake up around 3:00 am to eat suhoor, I wash my body, and around 4:00 am I pray, and then I begin my fast.
Dying to Love
He pointed to the facts: I lived in a nice condominium on a nice island a ferry ride away from a nice city where my nice partner worked at a nice job. I pointed to my feelings: My nice life was killing me.
Two Words I Didn't Know
I love that idea, that we are pilgrims on a journey through time. I love that we humans try so hard to find our places on that long road. And I love that you and I are ineffable, numinous pieces of some great mystery we will never fully understand.
Now
I wake with a kind of jolt in my stomach: I know where I am, but I do not know when I am. When in time am I? Are my children both sleeping in the other room? Will I hear their small feet pattering on the floor as they come in to wake me? Will they tumble into bed with Eric and me?
Meditation: Our Modern Prayer
As a witness of thought, it struck me deeply that I must be something much more than what had been running through my mind. I was so identified with thinking that I truly mistook thought for who I was.
On Constructive Anger
Being Black and being a woman, I have a complicated relationship with anger. Sometimes I am reluctant to show anger, irritation, or frustration for fear of being labeled an “Angry Black Woman”...Unfortunately, I am frequently angry when existing in most spaces.
Death Lodge
Pretty much all I did in the Death Lodge was cry, ugly cry. When my mother came to the Death Lodge, I saw at last how she had been broken by life...I saw how much she loved me, even when she hurt me.
Yet I Hated You
I tried and I have failed. I have failed and tried. I have struggled to seek and know a different place. I did not want to die but I wanted to give up.
Sympathetic Joy: The Other Face of Empathy
The secret beauty of sympathetic joy is that it allows a sort of emotionally free riding: you do not have to wait for joy. Look around, and let others’ good fortune become your own.
A Call to Prayer
It was clear they didn’t need me or my prayers that day. But I needed to be there, kneeling and weeping in that sighing space between words...I may have looked the part but...my tongue didn’t know the prayers.
On Expansion
I know the anxiety of willing myself not to molt, not to shed the protective layer of belief that once preserved me. It's not safe to let go of this, I've thought. This is the only right place to be...I talk to God and remember only one of us is afraid of the dark.
On Winning the Kalos Art Prize
Through my current series Seen and Unseen, I hope to create a quiet space for contemplation, allowing viewers to reflect upon the world that we have created and the future that we must sustain. The most pristine and remote parts of the planet are touched by the actions that we all have taken, and that we continue to take.
Vial: A Product Review
This vial is exactly the same sort of container that is used when people give out bubbles as wedding favors. Except there’s no bubble wand inside. Obviously there’s no reason for one, because it would be sacrilegious to make bubbles with holy oil.
Editors Ruminate: What Sustains
Asking what sustains is what sustains us. These poems probe the limits of sustainability in all its ecological, musical, labor-intensive, and emotional forms. The hope for this issue, then, is that it might sustain you too.
Blessings
I know blessing and prayer and words and ritual and body and grace and anguish and contentment and supplication. I suspect they are not one thing, but as I travel through them I cannot find their edges...
Hope's Fragile Wings
It’s been over a year since the Parkland, Florida shootings at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and over a year after the massacre in Las Vegas. It’s almost three years after Orlando, almost four years after Charleston, and six years, three months after Sandy Hook...We must seek light and joy again and we must do it with all our heart and soul because what is the alternative? Darkness.
Song of a Captive Bird: A Review
Forugh says: “Writing had cost me so much, but it was also the thing that saved me, that allowed me to live. I wasn’t the woman I wanted to be yet, but I was beginning to resemble her now.”
SEEN AND UNSEEN
Jennifer Cronin's visual art "Seen and Unseen" won first place in our 2019 Kalos Visual Art Prize and was selected by final juror Betty Spackman. It appears in Issue No. 50: What Sustains.
Love Languages
The ocean may try to kill me, but until it actually succeeds, it’s a give and take relationship—harmonious. It takes my false sense of comfort and security and gives me the gratitude of being alive. Writing may not be able to kill me, but I’m beginning to think it’s controlling me in other ways.
On the Search for What Matters
For the last six months I have been navigating this wall of hurt and pain and sadness and existential crisis. What matters? What really matters? Each thing that crops up in a day I weigh against all the other stresses. There is too much of it.
Riding the Waves of the Moment
At moments, I feel I’m like the rain, drowning in ceaseless sadness. Other times, I feel as if I’m a cardboard figure moving in a cardboard world. Sometimes, I feel like the indignant ocean wanting to lash out at Joe for leaving me.
Poem in Which Jesus Christ Sprains His Knee Fishing in Bethsaida
He twists it good, too. He wasn’t paying sharp attention to the angle of his foot / As he pulled the boat to shore. He pins his foot beneath the hull, moves his /Hips the wrong way, the knee slips. Down he goes...
Roof Clearing
Choreographed like a dance, pairs of officers asked each protester to leave, recorded their refusal, helped them stand, cuffed their hands behind their backs, and walked them to the waiting vans. Reverend Allison, third from the last to be arrested, chatted with those seated next to her, at times laughing as if they were waiting for an outdoor summer performance to begin.
“Love of the Thing Sung and Not of the Singing:” On Ambition
For everything I’ve accomplished in life, for every small victory, I find myself continually pushing myself to do better. That insatiable, ambitious ego within me—something so many writers have at their core—demands results, and quickly.
To Remake the World: A Review of Worthy: Finding Yourself in a World Expecting Someone Else
In Worthy: Finding Yourself in a World Expecting Someone Else...Mock explores gender equality, singleness, body image, and other cultural expectations that manifest inequity, courageously advocating for a world that embraces all people...Worthy...call[s] upon Christians to “remake the church from within..."
Hyssop and Cedarwood
My dress with the muddy hem is in the laundry and a garbage can full of empty bottles is still in the backyard. I’m happy I didn’t do a face plant and join what must be thousands of wedding mishaps on YouTube.
for the love of lowly things (for mary)
I knew Mary Oliver's work well enough to mourn her, to recall the way some poems snag you with their fishhook beauty and won’t let you go until you have reckoned with them. Perhaps most of all, the sacred imperative to give your whole self to a place and time—the endless and proper work of paying attention.
Creative Risks
It's scary to take creative risks, but I believe these risks help remind us to play and to stay vulnerable, nimble, and curious in our work.
I'll Leave the Light on for You
I have lived a long life in a world too few would recognize now. I reckon, by today’s standards, it was “old fashioned.” Simplistic? We managed to live with an ingrained sense of simplicity, of sufficiency. Our lives defied any particular sort of accumulation.
Waiting in Liminal Space
There have been times where liminal space became more like a burial shroud than a cocoon. I stayed in a relationship, friendship, or in bad habits, waiting in this space for as long as I could, never pushing forward, until I grew used to my surroundings in languish. Even in its awkwardness, there is a sacredness in liminal space.
Forgiveness Beyond Herself
Daily we pilgrimage to the saints' seemingly split facades: we interact—in families and communities, in cyberspace and private thoughts—and if we realize where we’re standing when approach their unhinged thresholds, we take off our shoes, bow, and offer puja.
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