Faith & Doubt

You’re fifteen and nowhere in a town on the edge of pitiful lands stripped of fruit. The burger van’…

By Heidi Williamson

I loved a preacher’s son.

Hide and seek
in labyrinthine basements
red roses and kissing.

A deep wooden…

I used to pray to a man-faced god.
Kept his whip beneath my bed.

Set alarms for daybreak lashings.
Pressed white cotton to the flay.

Made flags of the bloodsoak.
Raised them from my window.

Called this worship.
Dreamt heaven a jury small as a county

where nobody...

Between us, there are one hundred one
umber haints in our home.

In bed, we discuss
our future, our children…

I used to think
there was only one of  You
before the miscarriage.
Now, I am not so sure.
Maybe there are…

Ultimately everything
          Becomes boring.
Even great miracles
          Become boring.
Even the tremendous powers of…

How horrible it is, how horrible
that Cronenberg film where Goldblum’s trapped

with a fly inside his Material
Transformer: bits of the man emerging

gooey, many-eyed; bits of the fly
worrying that his agent’s screwed him—

I almost flinch to see the body later
that’s left its...

Rotor wash, or the downward-flowing
Air by which our helicopters formed
Imprints in the jungle grass beneath
Now stands effectively for Vietnam
Because our understanding of that war
Omitted many things but not the wind
We bowed our heads and fled. In this case we

Refers effectively...

In the hiding
hour of autophagy
ghosts hang out all day and talk to us.
An archival haunting demanding tribute:
     half a lime for breakfast every day.
بشرٌ يئنّونَ من الألمِ
human voices keening in pain
تُشعلُ أجسادَهُمَ النارُ
their bodies, consumed by fire
light up the...

The wish to climb a ladder to the loft
Of God dies hard in us. The angels Jacob saw

Were not himself. Bramble is what grows best
Out of this man-scarred earth, and I don’t chop it back

Till the fruit have ripened. Yesterday I...

Twelve o'clock.
Along the reaches of the street
Held in a lunar synthesis,
Whispering lunar incantations
Dissolve the floors of memory
And all its clear relations,
Its divisions and precisions,
Every street lamp that I pass
Beats like a fatalistic drum,
And through the spaces of the dark
Midnight shakes...

I

The winter evening settles down
With smell of steaks in passageways.
Six o’clock.
The burnt-out ends of smoky days.
And now a gusty shower wraps
The grimy scraps
Of withered leaves about your feet
And newspapers from vacant lots;
The showers beat
On broken blinds and chimney-pots,
And at the...

Ah blessed absence of God,
How lovingly I am bound to you!
You strengthen my will in its pain
And make dear to me
The long hard wait in my poor body.
The nearer I come to you,
The more wonderfully and abundantly
God comes upon me,
In...

I.

In a dark night,
With anxious love inflamed,
O, happy lot!
Forth unobserved I went,
My house being now at rest.


II.

In darkness and in safety,
By the secret ladder, disguised,
O, happy lot!
In darkness and concealment,
My house being now at rest.


III.

In that happy night,
In secret, seen...

When they plow their fields
and sow seeds in the earth,
when they care for their wives and children,
young brahmans find riches.

But I've done everything right
and followed the rules of my teacher.
I'm not lazy or proud.
Why haven't I found peace?

Bathing my feet
I...

After Donne

exeunt my heart, evangelical god, for you
            are still frosted and feathered somewhere
in the eighties, still fed with the fates of fetuses,
           “fairies,” and the virginities of fatherless girls.
you inhabited...