INKSTONE Spring 2013

INKSTONE Volume 16 Issue 2 – Spring 2013

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Inkstone Creative Staff

EditorsElizabeth ReidSarah Schock

Associate EditorsEliza Elkjer

Jovanna LaPlantMarie Pearson

AdvisorJudith Hougen

Graphic DesignerLeah Kirkwood

Art EditorMatt Smith

Cover Art: Anne Johnson, “Untitled,” screen print

Inkstone is the literary magazine of the English Department of Northwestern College, St. Paul, Minnesota.

Editor’s Notewind seeks and sings every wound in the woodthat is open enough to receive it,

shatter me God into my thousand sounds . . . —Christian Wiman, “Small Prayer in a Hard Wind”

Art, I’m beginning to realize, requires a shattering of self. A battering ram to the heart, a cracking open of the rusty locks that imprison our pain and fear and desire, those messy, well-kept secrets we like to gloss over with pastel paint. We settle for a simple, radio-ready song, when within us swells a symphony of a thousand sounds, a soul humming with rich, raw emotion, where both our passions and our wounds cry out to be heard.

This—the place buried inside us where our true selves dwell—is the wellspring of art. It’s where this issue of Inkstone was born, where—if you let it—it will come alive.

The writers and artists of this issue have dug deep into themselves to let their souls shine through. Much of the writing reads like a prayer, a quiet but urgent search for meaning. The setting for these thoughts? The natural world. In this Inkstone, rain and snow and dirt and sun are vibrantly present, casting light on a different sort of weather—an internal breeze, a personal storm. Together, the poetry, prose, and visual art in this issue show the full spectrum of human emotion, with colors as diverse and beautiful as the sky at sunset.

The older I get, the more I realize I’m not as whole as I think I am. None of us is. We were meant to be, as Christian Wiman says, shattered into sound—broken and made new, splintered into shards that, with a little glue, can be pieced together into the most magnificent vessel. It’s through those cracks that “wind seeks and sings,” whistling a tune of pain and pleasure alike.

This is the gift the writers and artists of this Inkstone have to offer you—little slivers of truth that sound something like songs, all of them blending to create an orchestra of music that’s soft in parts, loud in others, but always compelling and strong, like the most reverent hymn.

So go ahead. Read, and look, and listen for the melody that threads through it all. Sarah Schock

Poetry LiminalBrienna Rossiter

Primordial PrayerElizabeth Reid

Blues of East and WestSydney Askildson

Great Horned OwlMarie Pearson

i heard God . . .Isaac Lind

Face-FirstMarc Strom

ChokecherriesBrienna Rossiter

Three ConversationsSarah Schock

He WeptElizabeth Reid

Sky ThiefAnna Rose Meeds

Silent PeaceKayla Roper

We Were MountaineersSydney Askildson

HymnSarah Schock

ProseDream CatcherSarah Schock

Simply BaskHannah Gullickson

HollowMarie Pearson

Under the SunElizabeth Reid

FictionSecretsKayla Roper

Visual ArtMan with BlanketJoni Van Bockel

Untitled with Brush ScriptReid Oyen

Man with BunnyJoni Van Bockel

Pink and White Peruvian LilyLouise Kaiser

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Liminal Brienna Rossiter

I chant a requiem for milky sweetener, fingers pierced by rosy icingpainted over splintered truths

promises crunch in shards beneath my feet,no steel beams behind picket fencesfragile as fog against the blitz.

I want black coffee, faith clasped in my bruised hands amid the shipwreck, ringing chords through jagged canyons.

Why have we forgotten blood?

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Primordial PrayerElizabeth Reid

The vine is dried up and the fig tree is withered. . . .Surely the joy of mankind is withered away. —Joel 1:12

Clefted between valley’s edge and limestone wall,hear the pulse—water flowsthrough stone, living, steeped green spreadsblithely, surface damp from winter rains chalks onto your fingertips. Off the trail, past stubs of wall forgotten:leftover scrap of tenacious ancients’life terraced into limestone hills—terra rosa.Weaving through white quiver of almond trees, clumps of moist earth sloweach sinking step. Kneel,let the clock’s whirring ease, dissolvingwith your breath into atmosphere ladenwith condensation and Hebrew prayers.Cradle these remnants of vine-and-fig-tree living,these vessels of earth settling into the lines of your palms,foretaste of return.

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Blues of East and WestSydney Askildson

A July of raised umbrellas and close mistseized the streets of southern Seoul,plundering the Busan street markets.

It kept us inside for dayslistening to fat drops slap the broad leavesof camphor and bircharms stretched to second-story windowsof your hospital-white apartment,a steady rhythm all night,counting a beat for the voicesof drunk old men and catsin the slippery streets of Jangsan-ro.

In that borrowed bedroomI wished for Minnesotaand the songs of my own window—the crackle of crickets as sweet as a psalm,wind shushing through burr oaks my dad planted when I was six,our old house shuddering in thunderstorms,that sometimes brought rain,and sometimes didn’t.

Rain always came in the East.Slapping windowpanes, beating on roofs,regular as radio static, steady as the sighs of the sea.It came without rest or measure,never grew weary.It played right over me.

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Untitled with Brush ScriptGesso on paper with graphite powderReid Oyen

Dream CatcherSarah Schock

I’m in the middle of a pleasant, misty dream when I’m suddenly jerked awake by an urgent need to use the bathroom. Pushing myself into a sitting position, I open my eyes to the smear of darkness before me, ghostly shapes clouding my eyes like cataracts as they slowly swivel about the room, trying to thread things together. From under the door, a laser-sharp light beams, silhouetting my slouched frame in the mirror across from my bed, and steadily the blur of black begins to settle: there’s the clock in the corner, blazing 3:35 a.m.; there’s my large, slumping duffle bag at the foot of the bed, spilling sweaters and socks in every direction. And then I remember—I’m back at my parents’ house, on break from college. With that realization, the dream I’ve been dragged from—which has been hovering somewhere in the peripheral spaces of my mind—begins to rapidly disperse, like a handful of sugar sifting through my fingers. Remember this dream, I command myself, it’s a good one. But as I stand and stagger to the bathroom on stumbling, bare feet, that pastel-painted haze of dreamland gives way to a messy tangle of doors and walls and lights and thoughts, and gradually the dream dies.

* * * It was eleven o’clock on a warm September night in Coronado, California, when my eighty-year-old grandmother padded out of the hotel bathroom wearing the pink patterned dress I’d worn to her son’s rehearsal dinner that evening. Holding in either hand the sewn-in sash that tied around the waist, she looked up, flustered, at my sister and me lounging on the bed. “Can one of you help me with this?” Lauren and I glanced at each other, then immediately away so we wouldn’t laugh. “Um, let me help you find your nightgown, Grandma,” she said, standing and striding toward our line of suitcases by the window. I turned around to stifle the snickers that began to bubble out of me, but as I listened to the bustle behind me—Lauren sorting through Grandma’s things, Grandma streaming apologies and self-admonishments at her own stupidity—my smile slowed to a stop. We’d been worried about taking her on the trip. It was a long way from South Dakota, and she had Alzheimer’s, so her mind strayed a lot, always shuffling off the path we’d shoveled out for her. But her forty-something son was finally getting married. The happy, beachfront wedding, we figured, would be as good for her as it was for him. I didn’t understand the depth of her disease until that trip two years ago. She spent the three-night stay in a hotel room with me and Lauren, so we saw too well how blustery her life had become. The nights were the worst. I can sleep heavily, but I’d

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wake several times a night to her flapping open the vertical blinds, the white moonlight flooding inside, and the questions she’d call out, loud and uncertain as a child: “What are we doing here? What is this place?” I’d wait for Lauren to fulfill her responsibility as the older sister to lead Grandma back to bed as I rolled to face the wall, waiting for sleep to smother me once again. But my sister’s hushed soothing hunted me into my dreams, where I watched my grandmother pace back and forth across the shadowy room in her billowing black nightgown, the dreams melting with the truth until, like her own fast-fading mind, I no longer knew what was real and what was imagination.

* * * The alarm seems to crescendo in my mind, like a line of drummers appearing over a hill, marching toward a battlefield. With a low, guttural groan, I reach for my cell phone, fumbling until I slide the alarm away, then flop back onto the cloud of my mattress. I appreciate anew the plush enormity of my childhood bed, and think with contempt of the creaky, frameless twin I’ll have to squeeze back into when I return to my Minneapolis apartment. For a moment I lie still, my head burrowed into the crook of my arm, willing myself back into that place of silence and fog. It takes me a while to wake up, usually. I like hiding away in that private world. Sometimes, in my dreams, I become aware that I’m sleeping, and I transform into a kind of sorceress, conjuring and banishing things at will, turning back time if I want, and flying, always flying. Under the wool of sleep, we have that freedom. But from outside my door trail the sounds of morning, and cracks of light are peeking through the bars of my blinds. It’s time to wake up. For the second time in six hours, I feel sleep sliding off me, puddling at the foot of my bed. It’s like the dawn of day washes my mind clean, so all I’m left with is a faint whiff of soap. A tingling restoration. The door rattles with a series of knocks. “You up yet?” my teenage brother calls. “We’re leaving for church in a half hour.” I grumble something in reply and swing my feet onto the floor. Out of their cocoon, they’re white with cold.

* * * At the wedding, we sang the Beatles’ “All You Need Is Love” as my uncle and new aunt strode hand in hand up the makeshift aisle, a thin strip of sand between two clusters of white chairs. I beamed at their retreating backs, gleaming with streaks of late-afternoon sun, but I sang quietly, aware of how young and feathery my voice sounded next to the confident, cardigan-shouldered doctors’ wives scattered around me. But in the front row, my grandmother, wearing a sharp black skirt, a polka-dotted blouse, and a glisten of hairspray in her freshly curled hair, lifted her voice in an adamant

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song, staccato and firm, like every note was an exclamation. I don’t think she had heard the song before, or else she had forgotten it, because despite the fact that she was occasionally scanning the lyrics on the program in her hand, she was both off-key and off-beat. I wondered if I was imagining the thickness of her voice, or the quivering tug on the corners of her mouth. I wondered if she could even remember the name of her new daughter-in-law. My mind strayed to the rehearsal dinner the night before, when my stepmom burst out of the pub and into the light-strung courtyard where we had pushed tables together to eat. The humidity made her brown hair curl; it rippled around her glistening face as she hustled toward the group of women I was chatting with, a childlike thrill animating her voice as she declared, “You’ve got to see this.” We followed her into the cramped, blaring bar, where a couple of middle-aged men sat on stools before butter-colored pints, watching a clump of people dance to the clunky version of “Red, Red Wine” being played by three men in bowling shirts. The room was hazy and dull, lit mainly by small neon signs sporting phrases like This Bud’s for you—but my grandma, wearing the bright pink sweater my stepmom had packed for her, was easy to spot. There, in the middle of the dance floor, she was bouncing along to the music, her hands waving through the air, an unusually broad grin lifting her face upward. When she saw us moving toward her with bemused smiles coloring our faces, her eyes lit in recognition, but she didn’t stop swaying. I took her hands in mine, and we started a clumsy twist, laughing the whole time. Her pupils, I noticed, were pooling large in her eyes. I recalled dinner, when a friend had spotted her pouring someone’s deserted glass, half full of merlot, into her own empty one. We’d cut her off at that point. But watching my grandma bop her head to the music like a baby—a picture both comical and warm—I wondered if maybe she could use a little more juice in her life, a little more fun. When was the last time she’d danced? I thought of the high school dances I’d recently left behind, the jolt of energy surging through the great mass of our bodies, the muted friction of being held close by a boy. An unexpected fear lurched through my stomach. What if these were, as they say, my glory days? What if the ripest years of my life were slipping by me, ungraspable, like the fluttering dreams I would clutch at in the confused wake of morning? The inevitability of my one day entering that perpetual dreamland where my grandma generally hovered suddenly grabbed me, and squeezed tight. After the wedding, as we sipped jewel-toned drinks under a dimming sky, I asked my grandmother what she thought of the ceremony. “Lovely, just lovely,” she said vaguely, nodding. She didn’t expand. Someone stopped by to take a picture. I slung an arm around her, and she patted my back, fondly, as we pointed our smiles toward the lens. But my eyes were pulled

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beyond the camera, where the sky was bruising itself purple, swelling thick, the billow of color like the cloud that hung over my eyes when I slept. There was a grand, wounded beauty about that California sunset, perched above the swaying sea. But whether the sky was flourishing or fading—blooming itself back into life or slowly draining itself of blood—I couldn’t decide.

* * * It’s six o’clock, and I’ve spent the day with my family—hurrying, ten minutes late, into the bass-thumping church, feasting on egg bake and cinnamon rolls at brunch, speeding around town on a series of miscellaneous errands. There’s something whole about this day, like a glass filled to the brim. But I don’t have room for much more. Soon I will need to pour it all out, empty myself again. Cleanse the vessel. For now, my family is eating dinner off grease-sweating pizza boxes, all twelve of us strewn across the kitchen wherever there’s space—a cluster chattering around the table, two squeezed in at the counter, a few more on the couch in front of the muted TV, the darting colors of the football game mirroring our own flurry. I miss the way we used to fit about one round table, our bodies like plots on a simple connect-the-dots puzzle, easy as an equation. But life grows muddled with time, and the geometry we learned in kindergarten—circle, triangle, square—quickly crumples into a mess of zigzagged lines, knotted as the coarse curls at the back of my neck. It’s not a pencil shading inside the lines, but a scribble of crayon all over the page—a thick and textured sketch, a beautiful snarl. My stepsister’s infant daughter sleeps in her car seat at the foot of the couch, and when my father has finished eating, he strays over to her, bending down as far as his age-stiffened back will permit. As my siblings laugh loudly about some inside joke, I watch my father’s eyes smooth over as they settle on the baby’s doughy face, the smattered gray in his beard lifting in a laugh when she twitches, her nose scrunching up like a rabbit. I wonder what pictures are floating through her mind, or whether a silky blanket of black falls over her eyes when they’re closed. Either way, I think my dad envies her. Later that night, while a group of us is watching a movie in my parents’ bedroom, he begins to doze off, like he always does—first his eyelids start sinking, then he’s slurring incoherently, and finally he’s out cold, his body limp along the sheets, his mouth slack, an occasional rattling snore puncturing the silence around him. When I see him this way, devoid of the anxieties of his business and health problems, I spot the kid in him, the one who once dreamed of driving a dump truck, the one who wanted to become a basketball star. And maybe he dreams of those things still—maybe that’s what blossoms behind his shut eyes, when all I can see is his dormant body, rising and falling like the even pulse of a slow song.

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I wonder what I look like when I sleep. I’ve always been a little self-conscious about it, because that surrender, that severance of mind from body, is such a vulnerable place to dip down into. And yet there’s a fireplace warmth about it, a blending of the dark and light, that’s so seductive. It’s not the careful step along the balance beam, but the tumbling fall into the foam pit—a weightless, flying feeling. A drifting like snow.

Sometimes, in those dark minutes of waiting for the release of sleep, I realize I haven’t fully relaxed yet, so I force my jaw to unclench or my brow to unfurrow or my feet to stop fidgeting, and I feel so still that it seems I could slide straight into death. The quiet overwhelms my mind, and I wonder how it would feel to submit to that silence during the daylight too, to lose myself, forever, in a dream that doesn’t end. I fear for my grandmother, for the slippery grip she has on her life. I imagine that her memories flit and flicker the way my dreams do, in that fluid, nonlinear fusion of color and space and time, swirled together by the alchemist of dreams. Because when we sleep, none of that really matters—my fifty-four-year-old dad could be as young as my infant niece, and my grandma could be sewn together again. In sleep, we become blank as stones.

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On the third and last night of our stay in Coronado, I opened my eyes to the darkness, silent save for the steady buzz of the air conditioner. Trying to remain quiet so I wouldn’t wake my sister or grandmother, I tiptoed toward the bathroom, passing my grandma’s bed on the way; for once, she was sound asleep.

For just a second, I studied her face—the pink of her mouth a stroke of watercolor against the pale folds, the straight gray fringe a whisper along her brow—and in that moment I glimpsed her beauty. Here, under the nautical bedspread, was the woman who had sang me “Swinging on a Star” as we swayed back and forth on her porch swing, who fed me Famous Amos cookies while we watched The Wind in the Willows on her fluffy shag carpet. Looking at this calm, quiet face steadied by sleep, you’d never know she’d already lived through the deaths of her parents, her husband, and her only daughter, or that she was suffering from a disease that slowly chipped away at her too. The dreams, whatever they were, were carrying her.

Even then, I was tucking away the image, like a shiny gold token in my pocket—insurance for a rainy day. I turned toward the bathroom, flicking on the light before stepping inside. As I moved to close the door, I saw the sliver of light cast a bright glow on her face, splashing it yellow, and she stirred. In the moment before the door clicked shut, I watched her mouth twitch and her brow crinkle. I watched the dream get shattered, the silence destroyed, her expression disturbed like a rock plummeting into the unscratched surface of a lake.

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Automatically, I swatted the light back off, and the bathroom plunged into blackness once more. I stood still. From behind the door floated the muffled sounds of my grandmother shifting in her bed, the groan of the wooden frame as she stood, the quick patter of bare feet across the floor. “Hello?” she called, a tremble lacing her voice. I waited a moment before I came out of my cave, mentally clutching the token in my pocket, rubbing it lucky, that image of serenity a mantra in my mind. She turned her eyes on mine, two glassy orbs glinting in the dark, somehow vague, like the focusing of a camera. I think they mirrored my own. We were hovering there together, in that stretch between two worlds, that tug between the soft and the sharp, the celestial soar and the dirt-smeared gravity of earth. The mind, I think, is a tempestuous sea. We grasp for the stability of the scattered rocks, and when that fails, we plunge underwater, not to drown but to pretend we can swim.

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Great Horned OwlMarie Pearson

Shifts through airlike a shrug,dissolving in silver maple.

My dog runs to the fence and lifts his leg. Voice drains night, traces the tips of earth, laces my lips with earthquakeand snowfall—speech as rushing waters.How silence deafens my ears.

September cuts my knuckles, and I call my dog inside.

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i heard God . . . Isaac Lind

i heard God singing when He brought me into being, digging His calloused hands deep into the grains of sands which brought about my form.

His tune was soft, warm—trickling with melodies never(nor do i think will i everhear again) sung by anycreature since—though many (including i) do try.

with a final touch He sighed out His spirit unto me my spirit, His spirit be forever entwined—Two to One.He the Father—i His son

caught within His melody

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Simply BaskHannah Gullickson

I finish my charts early this day, as I close the evening’s assignments and head to my dorm. Burdened by Environmental Science and Elementary Physics, I drop my backpack onto the concrete stairs and plop onto my favorite bench, oak slabs knit from curves of wrought iron, resting between the sidewalk and the parking lot. White pines line the street with straw-colored needles and meander past the Ericksen Center down to the unnamed pond. Fog hovers above it as a hazy line nesting across the spots of dark water poking through the cracked ice. Near the shore, tangled weeds merge among mucky pebbles abroad distilled mud. Layers of pines form a web with their boughs, each branch splayed at acute angles like bristles from a comb. They fade into a whitened blur. The lamppost shines brighter than the hidden sun, accents the bristles’ silhouettes, stark against fading gradient. Blush meshes with gray like sooty ice. Clouds the color of peach puff then fade as if soaked into the mesh, while hazy lines of pines stick like spokes behind naked maples. Near my bench, a bonfire blazes for the Ericksen athletes. Teen guys in jerseys whoop as they commemorate some athletic success. Streaks shoot like firecrackers as flames crack open the logs in mini explosions, curling the bark from dirt to smoke to ashes leaping onto my bench as I brush away specks of soot. Elms glow golden as shadows flicker. Umber leaves, still clinging since autumn, flake as if rusted from winter’s frost. Whippoorwills squeak like a piccolo out of tune. Skateboards clip-clop over dents and cracks in the sidewalk. Cars whizz by on crunching gravel, their lights an interruption, their sudden flash illuminating the forest in a quick blaze like pale sulfur. There is a certain restfulness in this place. A certain refreshment that, though deadlines have crammed me into boxes and dates, there is a beauty even in the momentary sitting, when I ease myself from these burdens. I sit on the bench, breathe in this sulfur, and simply bask.

Man with BunnyInk on paperJoni Van Bockel

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Face-FirstMarc Strom

When you fall face-first into white sidewalk,landing between the groomedboxwood bush and campaign sign,you can only ask if there were any witnesses.Can anyone see the skids of redripe on the palms of your hands, peppered with grit,and the slight tear in the right knee of your Monday khakis?

Brushing off sand and leaf crumbs with the back of your hand,you look to the frog in the center of the immaculatelymown lawn, his googling eyes penetrating, and you beg him not to tell as he spoutsscorn and cool water from his puckered lipsinto a shallow ceramic pool.

From behind, the sound of feet slapping concretemakes you revolve around and glue your wrists to your back, a child caught red-handed.

You try to grin, to look handsome or at least happy,as a thin blonde in yoga pants scurries past,studying which song is playing on her iPod,

and the old woman in the house across the street, brick with white shutters and generous flower boxes,stands behind her kitchen sink window, shaking a freshly permed head.

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ChokecherriesBrienna Rossiter

Today I am picking chokecherries,reaching up to branches,dry grass scratching my knees,pulling sour red fruit

from trees hard and twistedas my grandma’s arthritic handsholding the bowl of wild tartness.

We walk back to her tiny farmhouse,perched alone on the endlessrim of South Dakota prairie.

Inside, I split stems from cherries,remember when I was youngerthinking they would be sweetlike the pies, too young to know the flavor of bitterness.

Now nineteen, I know pungentshades sugar cannot hideand the cracks in her hands for trying.

Every year, these pitsand stems of my grandma’s life,grow red in defiance.

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SecretsKayla Roper

You’d think I’d have gotten used to the idea of being engaged after seven months. Seven months of the same conversations and restaurant outings, the same people telling us they were happy for us as we gave the same response: Thanks. I slumped against the sink, slowly peeling potatoes as the radio played a Luke Bryan song. Chocolate chips were scattered across the counter, some hiding on the floor under the cupboards’ doors. Globs of raspberry jam and melted chocolate speckled and smeared the leaning tower of mixing bowls next to the sink already full of ice cream bowls, pizza pans, and water glasses from the past week. Truffles as elegant as a bakery’s waited in the fridge. I had spent all afternoon on them since I got called off of work and Nate’s family’s potluck was tomorrow. Meeting his mother’s standards was more difficult than shoveling snow in negative-ten-degree weather without gloves. The door cracked open to our small apartment, and Nate poked his head in as he stomped the ice off his boots. Melting snowflakes decorated his wet blond hair as he shrugged out of his jacket, rubbing his hands together as he blew on them. I hardly got a hello as he walked past me, giving me a kiss on the cheek, and sank into a chair by the table, flipping the newspaper to the comic section. Before he even finished a strip, he stood and turned the radio dial to pop music. I sighed and continued to quarter potatoes, throwing them into the pot of boiling water. I looked through the space in the wall as wide as the sink into the living room. He had bought a fifty-four-inch plasma flat-screen TV yesterday, and it took up most of the back wall. His two racks of DVDs sat on either side of it. Nate had shoved my Disney VHS tapes to the bottom shelves behind his DVDs; otherwise, his friends might see. I covered the pot of potatoes, stirred the corn, and opened the oven to check the meatloaf. Yanking out a wooden chair, I plopped myself down and rested my elbow on the small table opposite Nate, my chin in hand. I glanced out the window next to me, my eyes drawn to a dark blue Chrysler Pacifica that was pulling up next to the curb in front of the apartment building. I straightened out of my slouch and stared, wide-eyed. A woman was getting out, carrying a silver cake pan of some sort of dessert while a little girl in black snow pants, yellow jacket, and long, blonde locks jumped out of the passenger side, her curls bouncing as she ran to take her mother’s hand. She should be about four now, little Sarah. The girl was my spitting image. It wasn’t a coincidence. I had her when I was seventeen. A woman came out of the small house next to the apartment building, giving the mom a hug while Sarah hid behind the mom’s legs. Nate didn’t know about Sarah, but I was afraid to tell him. There were cheaper apartment buildings, but this one was the

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farthest that I could get from her adopted parents’ house. It would be better if she never knew me. I didn’t want a reason to remember the father either. “Just so you know, we’re going to Applebee’s tonight.” I turned to frown and point at the stove. “Nate, I have supper cooking already.” As if just noticing, he looked up at the steaming pots. “Wow, you’re actually cooking?” and then he looked back down at the paper. “Well I already told Steve we would have dinner with him and Terry tonight, so stick it in the fridge and we will have it later.” He glanced at the pile of dishes next to the sink and frowned at me. “Weren’t you home all day? You should have done some dishes or that crap from your chocolates is going to start stinking up the place.” “Truffles,” I enunciated. “And they are for your family’s potluck tomorrow. You have no idea how long those took to make, and you won’t be complaining when you take half of the plate like you did last time, so calm down.” He crumpled up the paper and threw it on the ground. “You know what? I’ll just go to the bar where a Coors is waiting for me. I’m not fighting with you tonight. Take some Midol and go to bed.” He stalked past me, grabbing his jacket from the small closet on the way to the door. I ran my fingers through my hair, wanting to scream. Why couldn’t he help me out for one minute? He had lived here for three months and not once had he ever swept the floor, washed a dish, or taken the clothes to the Laundromat for me. He came home from work and turned on the TV; I came home from work and worked all over again. When was it my turn to relax and sip a glass of wine? I crossed my arms and knocked my head back against a cupboard. Turning to glance out the window again, I watched irritated drivers wait at long stoplights, kids build plump snowmen, and couples so close they were almost one as they tried to keep each other warm. How did I let things get this far? Nate and I weren’t in love anymore, but neither of us was getting enough hours at work to be able to have a life outside of bills; we each had someone to come home to instead of a dark, lonely apartment, and he kept my nightmares away. Nate didn’t know about those either. I covered my eyes as I slid my back along the bottom cupboards till my butt hit the floor. After two years of dating, Nate hardly knew the girl he was about to marry, and I hardly knew him. Steve and Terry started going out the same time Nate and I did. They were the reason we met, and through the years had been our closest friends while others faded away. Their relationship, however, had gotten stronger. Nate and I had a good run starting out. He would open all the doors for me, surprise me on a random day each week with a different flower, and could make me laugh like no one else. Nate would find his way back to those days. I was sure of it.

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We rescheduled dinner with them the next night, but I was too distracted to pay attention to the conversations. I picked at my salmon, thinking we should have just had dinner at the apartment so someone would eat the meatloaf that was still sitting in the fridge. Terry asked if I was all right because I was being awfully quiet. Nate told her it was because I was tired. I just kept picking. We dragged ourselves home, finding three missed calls from Nate’s mother. She had been calling nonstop for weeks with “Becca, do you like these invitations? Oh, but Nate’s grandma will be able to read these easier” or “Becca, would you like to come to the gym with me? We want to make sure you still fit into that wedding dress!” It took everything I had not to smack her every time I saw that Botox smile. She’d order what she wanted even if I disagreed, so I didn’t even try. Whether it was Nate or the first guy running past the church in a sweaty jogging suit, I just wanted someone there to marry me. Maybe it didn’t matter that I didn’t love Nate. He had stopped paying attention to me a long time ago. Conversations at dinner dwindled from “Are we doing anything this weekend?” to “This steak is pretty good.” We drove past trinket shops with dancing-ballerina music boxes, clothing stores with skinny mannequins dressed in overpriced shirts, and bakeries with fresh homemade breads without saying a word to each other. I came home from work a couple nights later to find a new pool table sitting in the middle of the living room. My purse slipped from my fingers and clonked to the floor as my wide eyes stared at the man smoking a cigarette while lounging in his La-Z-Boy. “Nathan.” I couldn’t even make myself breathe. “What. Is. This.” He paused in changing the channel to look at me and rolled his eyes. “It’s a new car.” “Don’t be a smartass,” I growled, stomping to his TV and hitting the power button. I whipped around and glared. “What are you doing?” “What?” I snatched the cancer stick from his mouth and held it up. My eyes were as hard as my voice. “You know I have asthma, you idiot,” and I walked to the kitchen to put it out in the sink. He turned the TV back on to a basketball game. “That’s the only one I had in here, keep your panties on. If it bugs you that much, open a window and go outside for a couple minutes.” I snagged the remote from his hand and turned the TV back off, chucking the remote into the kitchen. “And where the hell did this come from?” I pointed to the pool table.

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He stood up from his chair, and I blocked his way from going to the kitchen. “Sears was having a sale, and I thought we might as well have some game nights to liven this place up.” I stared in disbelief. “Are you kidding me?” We argued for a half hour about cigarettes, friends, and how his little act may be the topping to a now-negative bank account. I pointed to the bills hiding under the stack of junk mail on the counter by the phone. “Have you even paid attention to how much we are spending?” Every time my voice rose, so did his. “You’re supposed to be keeping tabs on that.” My fists clenched, on the verge of shaking. “How can I when you go off and buy things that I don’t know about until I get home, and it’s taking up the whole living room!” Anger stirred, twisted, and warped into something hideous as every muscle in our bodies tensed. What was he going to do next, show up with a foosball table to take up the rest of our bedroom? How was I supposed to ever trust him with the checkbook? “You will either take back that honking piece of junk that probably cost more than my last paycheck, or sell that dang TV of yours that you spend more time with than your own fiancée.” “For hating my mother so much, you sure are turning into her,” he said, walking past me to grab a Coors from the fridge. “No,” I growled, smacking the door shut on him before he could take one. “Dammit, Nathan! I am trying to talk to you!” I took a deep breath and sighed. He crossed his arms, muscles tense.“What has happened to us, Nate?” “Could have something to do with your trust issues.” I froze, frowning. “What are you talking about?” He squinted. “Don’t give me that. You know exactly what I’m talking about. You think I don’t know? You think I haven’t overheard your nosy friends talking about her, wondering if you had told me yet? Figured maybe you knew me well enough that I wouldn’t freak out about it.” “You are freaking out!” “Because you never told me!” His veins began popping out from the sides of his head. “You have stared me right in the face every day, said yes when I proposed, made wedding plans while people talked about trust, and you didn’t say anything.” He would have asked questions I didn’t want to answer. Maybe I was hoping this town would mind its own business for once and let the past be the past. Sarah’s father didn’t want to be a part of her life, and I was in no place to be a mom. But everyone has a secret. I hadn’t forgotten about his. “Oh, like you are the best role model? Did you forget

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why we don’t hang out with my former best friend anymore? She was the one who had to tell me about your little fling the weekends I worked doubles. How do I know you aren’t keeping anything else from me? Is there a new secretary I should be aware of?” “Oh, don’t even bring that back up,” he scoffed, rolling his eyes. “That was two years ago. You’ve hidden that kid from me before we even started dating.” I stared at him for a couple seconds, taking a step closer. “You aren’t even denying it.” “Denying what—?” “So how old is she, Nate?” I accused, giving his right shoulder a shove. “Is she a little eighteen-year-old who needed a job now that she’s all grown up?” I shoved the other shoulder. “Does she wear shorter skirts than I do, or does she just have a bigger rack?” I pushed with both hands. “What the hell, knock it off!” He pushed me, making me stumble back a couple steps. “How long has it been going on, huh, Nate? Is that why you don’t kiss me anymore? Am I not as good as whatever tramp you’ve been macking on at work?” I screamed, wanting to rip his hair out. And with a whack, I fell to the carpet. The room flashed with black dots, my ears ringing as I lay in a heap, paralyzed for a few seconds. As my mind slowly cleared, I felt the full burn of where his hand had collided with my cheek. He actually hit me. I held my eye as I slowly looked up at him. His arm muscles bulged as his fists stayed clenched. Part of him looked surprised, but deep in his eyes a smile told me I deserved it. He didn’t rush to get me off my feet, didn’t ask if I was okay. I saw no guilt, though he apologized with his lips. Police sirens and honking horns seeped through the walls as I sat frozen, not daring to say a word. This seemed too familiar, though usually my drunk father was where Nate was standing, my mother the one cringing on the floor. The carpet tried to dry my sweaty hands, my arms about to give out. Like my father, Nate was a gentleman, a sweetheart when he wanted to be. It wasn’t until my parents were married that my mother saw who he really was. By then it was too late. I stared up into eyes that were deeper than a black well. I began crawling backwards and bolted for my bedroom, locking the door before his fists began pounding the wood, vibrating my back as I held it shut, closing my eyes. His words were meant to be apologies, but they were too forced to feel real, too urgent to sound true, too angry to be loving. I covered my ears with my hands, sliding my back along the door to the floor as I curled up on myself and rocked back and forth. My eye

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prickled and throbbed as it swelled. I wanted to rip it off, to scream, to run. I couldn’t do any of it. Nate gave up a couple minutes later, muttering curses as he stomped out of the apartment, slamming the door with such force that it shook a picture off the wall. I rested my head against the door, my old nightmares returning with a snap of deep black whips every time I closed my eyes. With a shaky hand, I took out my cell phone and slowly punched in the only number I could think to call, the only one who might have understood. She picked up on the second ring. I paused before answering her greeting, trying to contain my voice. “Mom?” The other end was silent for the longest ten seconds of my life. I was worried she would hang up on me, but she sounded confused. “Becca?” “My fiancé hit me,” I whispered. It took her less than a second to answer. “Where are you?” I gave her my address, and she said she would be there in twenty minutes. Was she really so close? I stood and walked toward the window on the other side of the room, pausing at my chestnut dresser. Opening my top underwear drawer, I searched through the thin lace until I found my mother’s small wooden box with an eagle on its cover. I searched through its old pictures until I found the one of me on my mother’s back when I was eight. At one point I had considered shredding it. We hadn’t agreed on what to do with the baby, and I had accused her of controlling my life when she wanted me to keep it. I held the picture close now as I waited at the window, watching for her rusting red Chevy Cavalier.

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Three ConversationsSarah Schock

I.True or false:the sky is blue.On a cold morning my eyes carry it,sticky smear of paste,blankness that fixes like a flash.

The static of windas my blood shrinks to stone.

II.Our steps, kneading the green-flecked ground.Earth as dough.

We patch words into collage,crusted twigs stuck to crusted bark.The pinecone you tossed like a coinchafing in the cave of my pocket.

Mostly, warm air spreads.

III.The searing of lightas I shrug out of the water.

Blooming wavetugging me toward the spill of sand,whisper of shadow along my calf.

The blue of the sea is thickerand bolder than the blue of the sky—streaked at the shore,dark as death where the surface stills.

I part my mouth in a sigh.The salt crisp on my tongue.

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He WeptElizabeth Reid

We know he was a man because, once told, he slowed as he neared death. See him,sandals scuff sand as Life feels the hollow of grief’s ache. Gravitypulls hard. An inevitable trek through desert: blanched undulations burn, sparse landforcing thought inward. Sweat and dust sting scratches from the stumbling of legsclumsied by cling of the Jordan’s mud.

He arrives, late, weighted by pained accusations that lips restrain but tear-smeared eyes reveal. Lazarus—once propped upby pulsing veins, his hands that coaxed life from tangled vines now skinsliding cold over worthless knuckles. See where we laid him. Look, he clutchesa sleeve, weak under the new-felt helplessness of unbidden weeping, Power enclothed fragile under tactless eyes that make comfort out of his vulnerability.

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HollowMarie Pearson

Introduction In the beginning impurity stormed the earth, perfection to pits. Churches house hospitals—no, are hospitals. Death never dies until the end. Meanwhile, blind lead blind, never too much, never enough, always deformity.

On Ring by Spring There are no rings in my dorm—not of that kind. We must be missing something: character, looks, athleticism, sanity? Well, I wasn’t thinking about it until you told me not to—when I was a kid, my sister told me not to look at a picture, but of course I did, and she shouted at me. But English lacks male suitors.

On Ozone Toxin. Machines spit it into our homes. Sterilizing. Oxidizes pollution. Shield. Complain about a hole that only exists three months out of the year, straight over Antarctica, and kills no one (but just for a while, until Global Warming is renamed Climate Change and we’re on to the next fad).

On Lexical Gaps Feminists are noisy. Womyn looks like wyrm, s/he cannot be represented by sound. Desperately needed, but nothing sticks, as if a hole, a slick spot on the English Words Chart, refusing to be sealed. German has the word. China has a word for someone who becomes rich without working. We could steal it.

On Teeth A hole in your head. Holding a splinter of your head, carefully excavated from Mount Gum. The absence yields blood, sensitivity, deformity of speech. A part of you missing. Can money truly replace it?

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Sky ThiefAnna Rose Meeds

Red pines tower up into blue, Daring me to steal a piece of sky,Moss and orange leaves under bare feet, Fingers brush the trunk, grasping at rough limbs,

I cling to the rungs of the tree asFeet fumble onto branches, The ooze of sap gloving hands, Pine needles accessorizing hair.

September wind collects hints of my family down the hill, Fumes of tractor gas and boiling applesauce.I lean back to gaze upon my shrunken house, away fromAlgebra worksheets and medication refills.

Inhaler-free, breath puffs out, As I sway, swinging my weight upwards.Fingers strain toward spindly treetop to snatch Glistening sky, sapphire waiting for the first claimer.

Sudden gust swims through the treetops,No longer the homeschooled Catholic girl, Wings outspread for takeoff, Diver before the plunge,

Eyes closed, clinging to the thin trunk,I inhale the sky, burning golden and purple.Brass bell clangs suppertime, Flight to another world stalled As I inch down, diamonds flicker on.

Pink and White Peruvian LilyWatercolorLouise Kaiser

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Silent PeaceKayla Roper

I.Drifting in a boat in Minnesotathe lake line buries under a thread of light.Squinting through pinesit spans the fragile morning,tips of waves like stars.

II.Light lifts like an infant from a cribas we tread through open airripples blooming behind the boat.Loons trill secrets through silence,their shadows casting a spotlight.

III.It is peaceful to silence the motorand gaze into light’s eye,the lake steady as a paintbrushtill the first bite drags the bobber to its depths.

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We Were MountaineersSydney Askildson

Those days on the Christmas tree farmour boots broke the crystal faces of virgin slopesand December sun glanced off their scattered tears,hard and bright.We hiked beyond the Douglas fir and white spruceinto cornfields turned to ruins,broken snow rubbled with earth and stalks.Into the still hollows of skeletal woodwhere we lay in a snowbank, eyes sealed shut,listening to the creak of frozen limbs in the wind overhead.White light that set the evergreens ablaze faded,ragged shadows fingered the bruised snow.The temperature fell like a drop from an icicle.I was locked in Daddy’s arms by then, toes smarting,the sawdust and rosemary mint of his flannel shirt collarcharming my nose as our walk slipped away with the light.

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HymnSarah Schock

I know if I find you I will have to leave a cup of waterand thirsty crawl out the back doorand claw the doughy earth where footprints wait and are madeI will dig desperate and rudetug roots graze worms grind teethform craters that echo the moon and sigh into themselves like sleep

And you will ooze as you doand wet my fingers will touch each other and weepand with you I will be a facula on the sun or a tiny flake of iridescent micaInside us are moths mammoths pipe smoke poppiesand some kind of paintingand a supernova and a breeze slightly ruffling

Lustful my eyes roam and see youyou who are a parade of lightswho are everywhere waiting and impulsive who are in the midday nap and in the sweat

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Under the SunElizabeth Reid

I’ll always remember the spring of my junior year of high school as the season when I daily watched the sun crawl across the sky and felt from it a desperate helplessness. It was Thoreau who started it—Walden, a daily reading from American Literature: “I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a revery. . . . The day advanced as if to light some work of mine; it was morning, and lo, now it is evening, and nothing memorable is accomplished.” Unwillingly, I found myself beginning to note the sun’s position each time I walked outside, looked out the window from my desk—it pulled ahead mercilessly as I sat there. That is my life—I watch the sun go round, shuffle through textbooks and papers. Eat. Sleep. That was all—empty as the sun’s circuit. Years of Sunday school had impressed upon me a few anchor points of meaning: Bible reading, prayer, church services, evangelism. But my times of prayer and Scripture were only half an hour each day, church service an hour and a half. And I hadn’t ever evangelized. What hope was there for the other 163 hours of a week? These spiteful questions were the trigger, the slipping point. It started as something acute. At my brother’s band concert that spring, I leaned over the balcony railing, presumably to hear better—really bending under the weight, the pumice-stone pain scraping across my lungs. Later, it became a deadening, watching the fingers at the end of my arm playing violin as though I were watching TV, something distinct and distant from me. Or whirling frantically around an oval ice rink as the wind bit into my cheeks—why can’t I feel anything?

* * * I grew up in a home with books stashed in every room, kitchen cupboards and the back of the toilet seat included. “Reids read” after all. I’ve realized recently that my early, formative experiences with Bible readings and church services were shaped by my frequent forays through ink-and-page portals into the numerous literary worlds I was discovering at the same time. Closing my eyes to pray, opening my Bible—these were ways to enter into something beyond my normal life in the same way that books were. Interruptions felt the same for both too. Being dragged out of a good book or leaving a church service—both induced the feeling of being woken up from a midday nap, the sudden jolt back to reality leaving me feeling crabby and disoriented.

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Last spring, I went there, the real-life version of the golden Bible story land I had so often traveled to in my mind, my inner place designated for Jesus. My whole life, everyone had spoken of walking where Jesus walked in hushed, reverent tones. I always pictured country roads stretching off through rolling fields, like those we drove past on the way to our cabin—luxurious lands with an allure that beckoned my imagination over the rims of their unfettered horizons. I expected to be overwhelmed in awe, to receive an instant faith boost. Subconsciously presumed a Jerusalem radiating holy auras. Instead, I found that same startling jolt to reality—but this time it was from the very land which, in my mind, had always been my mental-spiritual escape from it. I found no holy auras, but a land as harshly gritty as the world I had always lived in. As I walked around in the jet-lag daze of my first days in Jerusalem, I found the place strangely jarring. What I found there—graffiti, garbage, smoke—pierced up into the inner Bible-land construct I had carried around in my head, dismantling it with each uncooperatively unholy scrape of reality. I realized, as I counted yet another stray cat in matted fur a few weeks later, that the golden auras of my inner biblical story land had partially propped up my faith, wedging it, however subtly, from the real world I lived in. These were suppressed worries which I had only occasionally let surface before my time in Israel. They did sometimes though, in moments like leaving a candlelit Christmas Eve service my junior year of high school. I had always wanted to attend a candlelit Christmas Eve service, to bring that magical Christmas glow into a sanctuary, holding in my hand a quivering echo of Light becoming Life as I basked in the transforming glory of it all. It just seemed so romantically reverential. And it was. It didn’t take me long to get lost in the beauty of it all—the story of God piercing darkness resonated from a bass voice, soared with the reverberations of cello strings into a room thick with pine scent and glimmering lights. I was so enraptured that I didn’t even notice the hot candle wax oozing onto my fingers. Glory had come, after all. Real, searing beauty. And it had pulsed its way into my heart. So piercingly real to me in that moment that I envisioned myself climbing out my bedroom window when I got home to “shout it from the rooftops.” Then, it ended. Flames were systematically snuffed out. Switches flipped—sterile fluorescence.

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As we stepped outside, oak beams and soaring strings were replaced by snow stained gray from exhaust, an icy atmosphere that pricked my lungs as I inhaled. The realness of God and glory, the sense of envelopment I had felt were rapidly slipping out of my reach, evaporating with each puff of breath that clouded in front of my face. I heard once that doubts can be placed in two categories—emotional or intellectual. Pain or conundrum. Yes, I’d experienced both. But here was a type of doubt caused by distance—of alarm at the gulf I perceived between all those wonderful Bible ideals and my dirty-dishes, screechy-brakes kind of life. What was I supposed to do with words like glory, redemption, and light when actually out there skittering around in a world of gas stations and dirty snow? At home, I moved quickly through these moments to avoid the sense of panic they sometimes aroused. Solved the tension by refocusing on either transcendent thoughts of glory and light and life, or the stuff of life around me. In Israel, I couldn’t simply dwell in one or the other, but was suddenly required to straddle the divide between the two. There, I lived in the place where transcendence and realness had collided bodily, incarnationally. And I found it suddenly more difficult to believe. The second week there, we went to what is thought to be the Upper Room of the Last Supper. Passing a golden David statue, feet and harp worn from the frequent strokes of overeager tourists, we wove through a sari-clad tour group, mounted the narrow stairway to the Upper Room single file. Once inside, we clumped together, gazing around the dank room, cavernous with its plastered walls and stone arches that X-ed across the ceiling. Jesus. Here? I looked at the guys around me . . . Josh, David, Steve. If this were back then, God-man could have been any of them—would I have known? I used to mentally condemn the Pharisees—they had God right with them, after all, and didn’t even believe then. Rejected him when he came to them. How much easier it would be to believe when you were looking into his eyes. Maybe. But probably not for me. It was harder to take hold of, embrace to my bones, the idea of an incarnation—explosively holy presence confined in skin—when I was looking at flesh-and-blood people in this sharply real place. I fear I would have missed him. Scribbling notes diagonally across my notebook page in that dimly lit room, I was reminded of a conversation I had once in our campus writing center back home. My

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friend, a fellow tutor, fiddled with a stapler as we talked about being temples, wondered at God’s living inside us. Where in the flesh of us would he fit? And wouldn’t you almost expect a bit of a glow, if earlier indwellings of glory were so scorchingly brilliant that no one could look face-to-face and survive? The Upper Room, the writing center—these were more instances of that brief soul turbulence I had felt at the Christmas Eve service at home. I didn’t allow the question to form fully into words, but felt it—is this crazy talk, what we say about God actually living inside you? It’s mysterious how God disguises himself—merciful, probably. And confounding. C. S. Lewis must have felt this too. “He walks everywhere incognito,” he said. “And the incognito is not always easy to penetrate. The real labor is to remember to attend. In fact, to come awake. Still more to remain awake.” For me, a new degree of incognito penetration began in Israel the day we went down to David’s palace ruins. Leaning backward to counteract the trail’s steep gradient, I kicked gravel and continued in the inner friction that had plagued me at each of the purportedly holy sites we’d visited up to this point—was the whole semester going to be this way? What would I say to all the people who had sent me off so expectantly? Crumbling limestone preserved the palace’s original layout. Dr. Wright, in his trademark bucket hat and sunglasses, pointed out the toilet holes still visible, showed us a picture of a seal found there, bearing the name of David’s scribe. Set among valleys and hills that sloped down into it, the palace was in the bottom of a geographical bowl, top edges encircling the horizon. As the mountains surround Jerusalem, so the LORD surrounds his people, both now and forevermore. As Dr. Wright read this, I stood a bit behind the group, turning slowly in a circle to take it in: clutters of cement and smoke climbing the eastern hillsides, shadowy hills penciled above the southern horizon, chatter of Hebrew schoolchildren drifting down from the visitor center above us, atop a western rock face, temple ruins punctuating the northern-view slope. Listening to Dr. Wright read a psalm and connect it to the landscape there, I felt the inner tension I had been carrying begin to unwind. I never really needed an apologetic for Psalms; they were always inextricably real to me as my life—as the grass that prickled the back of my neck in eighth grade when I sprawled in a golf course, encompassed by a porcelain sky—For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is his love for those who fear him. This was the sort of incarnational nearness that I knew. After this, I started to begin my times of prayer and thought not by entering my inner contemplative place as I had been conditioned, but by rubbing my hand against

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a limestone wall, burrowing my toes into Mediterranean sand, sloshing through Jordan River mud. Forcing my whole mind and presence into these moments and places, re-embracing God not just into my mind or heart, but into this sharply real world—embracing the world to further embrace God. Coming home, the friction of inserting new self back into old place kept me fighting for this deeper awareness of God, for continued awakenings to him as one real and present as the tables and salt shakers and bathroom stalls around me. Though I couldn’t tie it down into words at the time, my strugglings were toward the mantra of Brother Lawrence, lay brother of a Parisian monastic community who spent his days scrubbing pots, repairing sandals, and “practicing the presence of God.” This was for him a consecrating of each moment by consciously welcoming God into it. A continual, habitual embracing of him that could be pulled into the pulse of a jostling life: “A little lifting of the heart suffices; a little remembrance of God, one act of inward worship are prayers which, however short, are nevertheless acceptable to God.” In the midst of a turbulent transition home, it was these little liftings of heart, accompanied by increased attentiveness to the present moment, that caused my world to burst suddenly into 3-D. Many of these occurred in the car, where the engine’s momentum made me feel empowered as I blasted the radio to think, to find a rhythm for the whirring in my mind. Driving along the highway in early July, I halted my thoughts to look up, to grip the steering wheel as I shifted my sweaty thighs—struck suddenly by the way the cumulus clouds curved off into the horizon, fading, ever smaller, but continuing around the world beyond my line of sight. It was a sudden crispness, unfolding of place, that left me breathless. I will instruct you and teach you in the way you should go—here, on a highway bridge, behind my cracked windshield. Instead of the world around me jolting me out of my awareness of God’s presence, it now began to jolt me more sharply into it. Let us enter the throne room of God, worship leaders had always said as we bowed our heads—as if his throne room existed more in our inner envisioning of it than the abundant manifestations of glory around us. But here, in and among the streetlights and rusty fenders of our lives, glory waits to be discovered, our atmosphere charged with the electricity of chariots of fire. “The soul should always stand ajar,” Emily Dickinson said. Here, now, as we wait in line at the grocery store or jostle through traffic, are our souls ajar to God? This practicing of God’s presence—the galaxy-defying, trembling-in-your-shoes sort of presence—in the present moment doesn’t just require energy, but it can be

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painful. Requires us to feel the pierce of the gulf between our dirt-and-grit world and transcendence, forces us to long. In Israel, incense and candles showed me this gulf, and a way of living in it. Though I grew up in churches that generally frowned upon such things, I resolved in Jerusalem to experience them for myself, armed in leather sandals and headscarf, at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, the place where Jesus is said to have died. There the only natural light source streamed down from the cathedral dome—we looked up, dwarfed at the gulf between us and transcendence. But wafts of incense and candle flickers reassured that we were journeying towards Him in the here and now. Nearby were countless crosses carved by pilgrims into an ancient stone wall—the grasping of flesh-and-bone people towards the eternal, carving it down into their world. Behind and perhaps through their incense and candles, these Eastern Christians had such a deeper grasping of transcendence, the unfathomable height and mystery of it. Felt such a piercing longing to inch across that fathomless gulf, not just in their hearts and minds, but in their actual, real-to-goodness lives—to touch, see, smell, hear the manifestations of that in their sensory world. Their candle flames flickered of smallness and finiteness, but reached ever upward. I now see these objects as manifestations of longing. I understand. It makes my stomach clench as I look around at the students slouched in stuffed chairs beside library windows snowflaked for Christmas, feel how far my life here is from transcendence. If only I could carve a cross in a wall, breathe incense, find something holy I could clutch to my chest. I don’t usually know how to bring God and glory and a kingdom of light into my real living, my real being. I don’t know how to bridge the gap between my surroundings and transcendence. And it scares me. But this is the inevitable result of any de-thawing of complacency—it will burn with the enlivening of the longings it had numbed. I think we’re afraid of the de-numbing of longings that the process of awakening to God in our present moments would require. But if all Creation groans, maybe we should start groaning with it. Israel is a land that knows how to dwell in longing. On a rooftop in the center of the city, a leathered man with dreadlocks and red, wide-rimmed glasses bobbed his head, drummed his djembe repetitively, gazing off into the streaks and shadows of the Kidron Valley beyond the city walls. Jewish boys, skullcaps perched atop heads with bouncing curls, clamored along the street below. Across the city, a woman’s unfiltered wails at the Western Wall: Adonai! Adonai! Adonai! She pressed a trembling hand against the limestone wall, clinging to this site where God once dwelt tangibly with men, now ancient remains.

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There is much pain in the Middle East, yes—but its people are so deeply, beautifully alive. They allow themselves to long, to keep stretching towards that gulf. Keep striving to incorporate the transcendent into the rhythm of their everyday lives. Here in America, most aren’t comfortable with longing—so we stuff in headphones and plug in TVs instead, drown any unruly stirrings of our souls in a swirl of digital technology and emotional froth. Could it be that in dodging, silencing our longings, our pain, we’re drowning out the megaphone that God is trying to use to rouse our deaf souls? Silencing the reminders that there is something beyond the walls of this world which our souls were made to enjoy here, now, even as we live confined within them? As Brother Lawrence proclaimed, “You need not cry very loud; he is nearer to us than we think.” And our world is so much more alive—meaning ever shimmers for those with the courage to unlayer it.

* * * Flannery O’Connor once described the sun as a hole in the sky. When I first read that, I thought it the projection of an excessively dismal mind. But, walking across my college campus the other day, I saw it. It came through a sky smeared gray, one hardly worth scrutinizing. But in the center, the sun punctured through—a flash of luminescence, aching and brilliant, free for any who stopped to look.

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Contributors’ NotesSydney Askildson is a senior English Literature major who loves Jesus and wants to spend her life discovering Him. She suffers a serious case of wanderlust and revels in thunderstorms and Cole Porter’s songbook.

Hannah Gullickson is a junior English Literature and Writing major with a Journalism minor. She has a greyhound named Callie and loves walking through pine forests and camping by the St. Croix River.

Anne Johnson is a junior Graphic Design major from Andover, MN. One of her dreams in life is to live out of a quince . . . or possibly a tree.

Louise Kaiser is a junior Visual Arts Education major who recently found a new passion for painting.

Isaac Lind is a junior Psychology major. His favorite pastimes include writing, reading, and thinking on things a little too much. His favorite authors are Walt Whitman, e. e. cummings, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Anna Rose Meeds is a junior Professional Writing major with an English Literature minor. Ever since scribbling crayon poems about bunny rabbits as a young child, she has turned to writing to better understand God, the world, and herself.

Reid Oyen is a sophomore Studio Art and Graphic Design double major from Minneapolis. Contrary to some impressions, he is only seldom aloof. He probably knows your face but not your name. He digs bicycles.

Marie Pearson is a senior English Writing major who listens to Gregorian chant while she studies. She recently read six Jane Austen novels in five weeks, a feat which she will never repeat and does not recommend to anyone.

Elizabeth Reid is a senior English Writing major who takes great joy in hummus and English tea. She sometimes wishes she could run off and herd llamas in the Andes.

Kayla Roper is a junior English Writing major from a small farm town in southeast Minnesota. She believes a day without music is a day wasted, a week without writing is impossible, and off-roading is the best outside activity.

Brienna Rossiter is a sophomore Piano Performance major and English Writing minor who loves tea and everything British. When she was eight years old, she was confounded to learn that people actually buy tennis balls.

Sarah Schock is a senior English Writing major with an unscratchable itch to travel. She enjoys all sorts of weather, especially summer storms, when the air is charged and the lightning splatters against the night sky.

Marc Strom is a sophomore English Literature and Writing major. He could be a marine biologist if he really wanted to. But he’s not.

Joni Van Bockel is a sophomore Studio Art major. She just really wants to make stuff. That and own a hairless cat. Meow.

Sydney Askildson

Hannah Gullickson

Anne Johnson

Louise Kaiser

Isaac Lind

Anna Rose Meeds

Reid Oyen

Marie Pearson

Elizabeth Reid

Kayla Roper

Brienna Rossiter

Sarah Schock

Marc Strom

Joni Van Bockel