So much good stuff from the online journals I’ve been reading lately, I had to make a separate links post!

At Frontier Poetry, Chris Watkins queers George Herbert’s tradition of Christ-haunted sonnets in “Prayer (II)”.

Prayer—even now, secular,
every poem you write, a knees-bent child
leaning on their mattress. The mouth molecular.
The porno of your guilt. A Girls Gone Wild
of the soul. …

Sara Fetherolf’s “On Renting”, the Feb. 26 Poem of the Week at the Missouri Review, is a modern-day psalm that swerves rapidly between faith and doubt, compassion and cursing, and back again. The landlord, like a jealous God, offers shelter, for which the narrator is supposed be grateful, but the price is petty surveillance and a feeling of humiliation.

…Once, I was taught the Lord
owns my life, spreads the sky
like a ceiling over my head, grants money

to those he favors, lightning otherwise.
I suppose the landlord is
a small, frumpy incarnation of that
Lord, taking it upon himself
to trudge past my window

and inspect the meter, talk
to the lime-vested employee
who is calculating our bill
and not his. In the last days
of my faith, I came to think of the Lord

as an enormous grub,
pillowy & pale as curdled milk.
He eats rot into this earth
like a maggot into a potato
but it is human meat

He craves. He wants to make us
in His image by consuming
us down to the bone. …

Also from the Missouri Review, Robert Long Foreman’s “Song Night” is a hilarious and touching story about a guy who decides to be honest with his teenage daughter about their shared enjoyment of marijuana.

What was I feeling? Shame? It was something like shame, but I also knew this wasn’t such a big deal. Teenagers get high. They’ve been doing it since at least the 1960s. They probably did it in the 1860s. And why shouldn’t they? Sure, they should take care of their internal organs, but then, everything causes cancer, now that the world is a trash heap. Even the water we drink causes cancer, as does the air we have no choice but to breathe. And it’s not like teenagers have urgent business to attend to that being stoned would prevent them from addressing properly. They should probably be high all the time, since in the years ahead, there’s nothing but dullness awaiting them and people they won’t like having to deal with but who are somehow in charge of whether they keep their jobs and how much money they’ll make.

Abigail F. Taylor’s “Snagging Blanket”, a flash fiction finalist at Fractured Lit, is like a ballad by The Highwaymen, in that it captures an entire life story of love, loss, and bittersweet wisdom in just a few minutes.

Sundance Lee draped his old snagging blanket around his shoulders. It hadn’t snagged anyone for many years. His legs were too skinny, and there was too much silver in his thin braids. Still, it was powwow season. He had plenty of opportunities. During the Grand Entry the day before, he caught a white woman whispering “aho” in quiet fascination to herself, trying to mimic the emcee’s cadence. Her eyes flitted nervously in Lee’s direction; he was standing so close, and he almost snagged her with a smile. It would have been that easy.

Except there was something churchy about her, like she’d become frightened by him once they were alone and naked in his camper. The equal parts of fear and desire in the so-called ‘exotic’ reminded him of his first wife. So, he left the woman alone to her muttering. …

I’m excited about poet Phillip B. Williams’ debut novel, Ours (Viking, 2024). In this installment of their “Ten Questions for…” author interview series, Poets & Writers Magazine describes the book thus:

In this historical narrative with a supernatural twist, the plantations of 1830s Arkansas are overtaken and liberated by a heroic woman named Saint, who wields immense, otherworldly power. Under Saint’s aegis, the formerly enslaved people travel to a hidden town where they are able to build lives for themselves and their families.

Williams’ response to one question shows a refreshing equanimity:

If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started Ours, what would you say?
Nothing. I’m not about to change the trajectory of what I’ve created. If I encourage younger me, I might get cocky. If I warn younger me, I might take fewer risks. I’m not saying a thing.

At Jewish Currents, Solomon Brager’s graphic narrative “Put Up, Take Down” even-handedly depicts the rhetorical battle between pro-Palestine and pro-Israel posters since Oct. 7, and how these campaigns have been both amplified and distorted by media outlets with their own agendas.

It’s March Xness time again! This year, the editors of DIAGRAM are staging playoffs among 64 iconic dance songs from the early 2000’s. My problematic fave from this playlist, which hasn’t come up in the bracket yet, is definitely “Get Low” by Lil Jon and The East Side Boyz. I’ve been replaying it on Spotify till the sweat drop down my balls (my balls!). Which is saying a lot, since my balls are made of silicone.

Never fear, Chris Rock is here to absolve us, in this clip from his 2004 HBO special Never Scared. If the beat is good, who cares what it says?