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Jesus Crawled
Connor Fisher
After the accident, our parish halls grew swollen. I weaned
lambs from the pale soap that cascaded down
their mothers’ swollen udders. My
fingers parted their begging mouths. I shook confetti
from their hooves in the webbed mesh
of night. My mother held the bulbs of
her crimson amaryllis and summoned
the lunar new year from its green
nirvana. That night I spoke to tulips. That
night I smoked and smoked; tobacco leaves
grew fur and I shined a light in their yawning
mouths. Jesus wore a halo. It had never rained
so gently. Jesus crawled below the surface
of a claw-foot tub, among imagined gardens
of aloe and jade. Children inundated the
square and their faces ticked with the pleading
rhythm of a cat’s tongue. I drank tears from soup. I drank
and drank as the last drop sunk inside itself.
from the journal APARTMENT POETRY
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I wanted to write a potable poem. “Jesus Crawled.” There are lambs being “weaned / from pale soap.” I “smoked and smoked,” which is as close to drinking air as I could do without dying. There are “gently” falling rains; “a cat’s tongue” laps at the faces of children as I “drank tears from soup.” Even the “last drop” consumes itself in the poem. Put these words in your mouth.

Connor Fisher on "Jesus Crawled"
Image of brown peonies and abstract waves on a cream background
"Examining Phillis Wheatley"

"New discoveries about Phillis Wheatley—including Cornelia Dayton’s recent findings bringing to light the final four years of Wheatley’s life, after her marriage to the shopkeeper-tradesman John Peters and the birth and death of possibly three children—urge us to reexamine what we know and what we might assume about how Boston luminaries of her time saw her and her work."

via LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS
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Cover image of Amelia Rosselli's L'Opera Poetica
What Sparks Poetry:
Deborah Woodard on Amelia Rosselli's "The Dragonfly"

"What I hope comes through in my and Roberta Antognini’s translation of this passage is the obsessive insistence with which Rosselli demands we search for and find Ortensia, and how equally insistently the text embodies a desire that is somehow delicate, hermetic and insatiable by turns. Rosselli takes the onanistic, gratingly abrupt though brilliant original and gives it a brand new lyrical body along with a new subjectivity to inhabit that body."
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