"I'm not a religious person but" by Chen Chen

God sent an angel. One of his least qualified, though. Fluent only in

Lemme get back to you. The angel sounded like me, early twenties, 

unpaid interning. Proficient in fetching coffee, sending super

vague emails. It got so bad God personally had to speak to me. 

This was annoying because I’m not a religious person. I thought

I’d made this clear to God by reading Harry Potter & not attending

church except for gay weddings. God did not listen to me. God is

not a good listener. I said Stop it please, I’ll give you wedding cake, 

money, candy, marijuana. Go talk to married people, politicians,

children, reality TV stars. I’ll even set up a booth for you,

then everyone who wants to talk to you can do so

without the stuffy house of worship, the stuffier middlemen,

& the football blimps that accidentally intercept prayers

on their way to heaven. I’ll keep the booth decorations simple

but attractive: stickers of angels & cats, because I’m not religious

but didn’t people worship cats? Thing is, God couldn’t take a hint. 

My doctor said to eat an apple every day. My best friend said to stop 

sleeping with guys with messiah complexes. My mother said she is 

pretty sure she had sex with my father so I can’t be some new 

Asian Jesus. I tried to enrage God by saying things like When I asked 

my mother about you, she was in the middle of making dinner

so she just said Too busy. I tried to confuse God by saying I am 

a made-up dinosaur & a real dinosaur & who knows maybe 

I love you, but then God ended up relating to me. God said I am

a good dinosaur but also sort of evil & sometimes loving no one. 

It rained & we stayed inside. Played a few rounds of backgammon. 

We used our indoor voices. It got so quiet I asked God 

about the afterlife. Its existence, human continued existence.

He said Oh. That. Then sent his angel again. Who said Ummmmmmm.

I never heard from God or his rookie angel after that. I miss them.

Like creatures I made up or found in a book, then got to know a bit.

From "Onset" by Kim Addonizio

it’s spring   

and it’s starting again, the longing that begins, and begins, and begins.

March 8 (Content Note: SA & DV)

It is fitting and devastating-I-mean-fucking-soul-shattering that the poem the poetry magazine has decided to feature on International Women's Day is about rape. Because what will resonate with all women, they must have asked themselves, the ones reading this in England and in Africa and maybe a few in Asia or Eastern Europe and certainly much of our readership is from the USA--what do they all have in common and the answer is rape. The answer is the knowledge of what it is to feel violated and afraid. In varying increments, of course, and with varying levels of intersectionality. Let's send out a poem about rape and call it a day. Or maybe they were taking a stand. I don't assume their intentions. I read what is written and what was sent to me on International Women's Day, a day when I am meant to celebrate myself, a day when I am supposed to think about the grandness and greatness of women, and here I am thinking about rape, my own, my friends', my aunts', the women I've counseled afraid in the dark in the middle of the night, their breathy voices finding a few brief moments of sanctuary on anonymous phone lines whispering please don't hang up and me staying steady promising I won't. I'm here with you. I'm not going anywhere. But of course I was never with the them, not in the flesh, and it's the flesh we're talking about aren't we? and when they hung up the phone and turned he might be standing there, behind them with a lamp in his hand, ready to bash their head in.

And I'm thinking about how he understands none of it, husband, how he has no idea what a day like International Women's Day can mean, or what it might mean to find in my inbox a poem about rape on International Women's Day, or how that might cause my brain to start thinking about how many hands I have fought off me, the times I didn't, how much work and how long it has taken me to return to my body, how I still struggle to stay there, why I couldn't let him touch me sometimes, why sometimes fantasies feel safer and so I think about other people I look out the window at the falling snow, I stare at Wilson's cute little face until I feel like some semblance of myself and as I settle back into my body I feel once again that I am a woman, this is a woman's body, and some would equate that with rape, and at times I have equated that with rape, I have felt like nothing but raped, and also this body is soft and strong and flexible and resilient beyond fucking belief I mean she has been through a lot and here we are together, I walk through the world feeling strong, my body is stronger than I ever knew it could be, and there's a correlation, isn't there, because even though it's taken a while here I am, a woman, sitting with and in myself on International Women's Day, talking about rape and not defined by it, no never defined by it you asshole, thinking about all the women walking around feeling strong or feeling weak--it doesn't matter--sitting with and in themselves today, thinking about the grandness and the greatness of womankind.

From "The Architecture of a Love Poem" by Alexandra Peary

the heart had such a fancy elevator

              that it started to look like a bird cage

"The Chairs That No One Sits In" by Billy Collins

You see them on porches and on lawns 

down by the lakeside, 

usually arranged in pairs implying a couple 

who might sit there and look out 

at the water or the big shade trees. 

The trouble is you never see anyone 

sitting in these forlorn chairs 

though at one time it must have seemed   

a good place to stop and do nothing for a while. 

Sometimes there is a little table 

between the chairs where no one   

is resting a glass or placing a book facedown. 

It might be none of my business, 

but it might be a good idea one day 

for everyone who placed those vacant chairs 

on a veranda or a dock to sit down in them 

for the sake of remembering 

whatever it was they thought deserved 

to be viewed from two chairs   

side by side with a table in between. 

The clouds are high and massive that day. 

The woman looks up from her book. 

The man takes a sip of his drink. 

Then there is nothing but the sound of their looking, 

the lapping of lake water, and a call of one bird 

then another, cries of joy or warning— 

it passes the time to wonder which.

"The New Religion" by Chris Abani

The body is a nation I have not known.

The pure joy of air: the moment between leaping

from a cliff into the wall of blue below. Like that.

Or to feel the rub of tired lungs against skin-

covered bone, like a hand against the rough of bark.

Like that. “The body is a savage,” I said.

For years I said that: the body is a savage.

As if this safety of the mind were virtue

not cowardice. For years I have snubbed

the dark rub of it, said, “I am better, Lord,

I am better,” but sometimes, in an unguarded

moment of sun, I remember the cowdung-scent

of my childhood skin thick with dirt and sweat

and the screaming grass.

But this distance I keep is not divine,

for what was Christ if not God’s desire

to smell his own armpit? And when I

see him, I know he will smile,

fingers glued to his nose, and say, “Next time

I will send you a down as a dog

to taste this pure hunger.”

you do a great job winging it

Once again I have lost myself.

It's exhausting, isn't it?


So I do the work before me: I drink whiskey out of a jelly jar and I start writing again. Rusty. And I start caring for myself again. Rusty.

This time is gonna be different. How many times have I heard that bullshit. This time I am telling it to myself, and it isn't bullshit because I'm bullserious.

I am going to change my life.



In the still frame his face looks the same as the fake witch's face beside him. The fact that he is married to Joanna Newsom makes him enormously more interesting. The fact that his face looks like the witch's face is merely a temporary trick of the television.

Normally my years are devoted to one theme; this year is devoted to three. Healing, focusing, and liberation.


The focusing part is the hard one. What I know for sure is that I want to write more again--more of what I want to write, not what I've been paid to write. What I know for sure is that I want to keep buying records at the local record store and dancing to them alone in my living room. What I know for sure is that I want to keep spending more and more time with the amazing women friends that I've made. What I am considering is running for mayor. Or maybe moving somewhere totally new. I want to go down on the kind man who [redacted] and learn how to ice climb with the kind man from [redacted]. What I know for sure is that I want to get pickier about only interacting with kind men. Quite possibly I will start painting again.


I don't want to seem like an asshole but I also don't need to kiss their butts, ya know?