Poetry
Sept/Oct 2021
Thoughts and Prayers Triage
Thoughts to the left. Prayers to the right. Everywhere the miseries have begun to interfere with proper routing of our claims. For faster handling, Thoughts from those previously certified “Faithful” […]
Poetry
Sept/Oct 2021
Mind the Gaps
Mind the gap, nagged the Station, every 45 seconds. Such a tiny gap: an inch or two between train’s wobble and platform shake, hardly worth giving so much mind. • […]
Nature’s Nature
May/June 2019
Argus and Mole
Say, in your own words, what this proverb means to you: “Argus at home, a mole abroad”: Who can see what they see, with their pink- fleshy fingerlike snout- tendrils, […]
Nature’s Nature
May/June 2019
Sufficient Unto the Day Is the Trouble Thereof
Unminded, unmoaned: the mindless lilies of the field: consider their incapacity to consider anything, nematodes and slugs gnawing through their rhizome, the Christ-blood-drops that turned them carmine, or Adonis’s blood, […]
Poetry
Nov/Dec 2017
And Think Yourself Yourself
for Emily Dickinson When a thirty-pound octopus squeezed through a two-inch spaceand stayed hidden in a tiny crevice behind her tank, Seattle Aquarium officials named her “Emily Dickinson” because […]
Poetry
Mar/Apr 2015
The Name of the Island Was Marriage
I The name of the island was Island and the name of the Friday was Good. Sunflower roots lay smoked on a bed of moss over sea-flattened stones and sealed […]
Poetry
Summer 2013
Who Taketh Away
Lamb of God, who taketh away the sins of the world, have mercy on us … They used to say why in the middle of a sentence, caesural, interruptive with […]
Poetry
Summer 2011
Me Meaneth
I. The calf lay meaning herself. What does that mean? The calf lay moaning in the pasture. As in a long-forgotten Scottish poet's lines the dictionary lets demonstrate one thing […]
Poetry
Summer 2009
Reading the Not-Written
agrapha (not written): the sayings of Jesus not in the Bible i. A papyrus leaf from the desert trash heap’s mutilated oracle, with one word left there of some outspired […]
Poetry
Summer 2009
Pilgrim’s Deviations
(First) The holy orders’ susurruses, indistinguishable, then the setting-forth, the in-direction: first toward crux, then lux, then x. I’ll say the Nones at 3, the Crucifixion hour. No Dies Irae, […]
Writing in Code: Literature and the Genome
Winter 2006
Genomic Vanitas & Memento Vivi
❦❦❦ (Vanitas) Of thy last end, in all thy works, be mindfulthe still life’s legend insists: lyre & death’s-head clock, depetallingtulip & convolvulus-canker, wrought silver candle-snuffer,& fruit flies’ agitated sphere […]
Poetry
Summer 2001
The Vanishing Point
The painting has vanished. The icon remains—Robert Payne, On Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper. To lessen the impact of the blanks, a beige watercolor now covers the gaps […]
Poetry
Spring 1998
The White Children of Macon
. . . for the sole, perpetual, and unending use. . . of the white women, white girls, white boys, and white children of Macon, to be by them forever […]
Bruce Beasley
Bruce Beasley is the author of six collections of poems, most recently Signs and Abominations (Wesleyan), Lord Brain (winner of the University of Georgia Press Contemporary Poetry Series Award), and […]