Winter 2021
Our Winter 2021 issue features interviews with Natashia Deón, Willie James Jennings and Alice Bell, short fiction from the EcoTheo short fiction contest by Lucy Zhang and Matt Paczkowski, and visual art and writing by Ayokunle Falomo, Carolyn Chaffee, Robert Wrigley and more.
RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
by Margaret Wack
I think it must be like the weight of a mountain range upon your back,
the summer snow trickling down your shoulder blades. A hundred
other hands pressing your body to the earth, and not all of them are
kind. The pressure of the deep sea, thick like ink, squeezing your cells
to rapt exhaustion. I think it must be cold. So cold it burns. I think that
it must hurt, but it’s a hurt you’re hungry for. It lights a smoldering coal
inside your stomach that cannot be quenched by flood or fear of bright black
water. Do you understand what I am telling you? I am too light, so light
that I could float, and I need to be sinkable, need to be weighed down
and drowned. Could you picture the rapture gentle? We think of god
as all the violent animals, the thundering sweat-stained bulls, the vicious
swans, the flickering iridescent snakes, plague upon plague of white
electric light against a shattered summer sky. When I open my mouth
I want a dark plumed bird, a stream of silver fish, a brackish sea, a river
of pearls, a riot of hibiscus flowers to spill from me, to stop my breath
until the shuddering panic of the body gives way to wonder.
An Excerpt from “Where the Strawberries Grow”
by Matt Paczkowski
The lightning through our skylight keeps me awake. Every few minutes, another flash. I watch the scattering of raindrops against the glass and listen to the cascade of water washing down the roof and clanking into tin gutters. I turn on my side, away from my husband, and I watch Emma in the nanny cam. She lies there, a glowing silent splotch on my screen.
Thunder sounds: a startling crack, and the windows rattle in their frames. I swear that one of these days, that pitch pine out back will come crashing through the skylight and kill us both. I pull the sheets in and glance at the glowing time on the nightstand: 2:12 AM. Another flash of lightning casts pulsating shadows across the bedroom. I rise, half-knowing that I shouldn’t risk waking Emma.
She doesn’t need me, I know that, but is it so wrong if I need her?