Summer 2022
Our Summer issue features artists and writers embodying and considering Entanglements. Get caught up in interviews with award-winning authors Reyes Ramirez and JC Niala, theologian Luke Beck Kreider, and visual artist David Chang.
Incomprehensible Birds
by Katelin Kelly
like a cow 40 feet
up the mountain
bending to hush the grass,
as a dog coils
itself wet
into a hedgehog,
like skinning a snake
by hand only
to feel it widen,
as bright as what
a hoof’s underside absorbs
before reflecting back,
like a prairie dog
pups up and
then to a warm dark,
as a frog is slapped
by a tongue
that is not his,
like a goat on the ground
of a butte, nothing circling but
the bones of his hide,
you say we,
say we,
say we know.
Someone Else’s House
by Trinh Mai
from “Convergence”
by Nell Smith
The Gila River—opaque as butterscotch and laced with agricultural runoff—is ornamented with styrofoam cups, discarded truck tires and diapers engorged with river water. The vegetation is thick so it’s easiest to move in the river. I slide down the slick bank past the prints of a black bear whose movements I echo.
The calf-deep water is cool and ripples shimmy away from my footsteps like the fish that curl into eddies as I walk downstream. The Gila is one of the longest western rivers. Not so long ago, I could have floated from the headwaters in New Mexico through to the Gulf of California in a kayak or raft. Now, water is siphoned off into agriculture fields, reservoirs and canals that turn the Gila into a trickle halfway through its 500-mile journey towards the Colorado River. By the time it reaches this valley southeast of Phoenix, the Gila, whose headwaters are often called the birthplace of wilderness, is no more than an intermittent stream. My hiking boots saturate and sand fills their mesh as I wade, listening to the slur of my steps mix with the ensemble of birds calling along the river’s corridor. Under the shaded arbor of tamarisk, I pause. I am quiet. Sometimes you can only find a thing by being still.