The Windhover

23.1 The Windhover

23.1 Spring 2019

Editor Nathaniel Lee Hansen

Contributing Editors Joe R. Christopher William Jolliff Michael Hugh Lythgoe

Graphic Editor Randy Yandell

Copy Editor Amy Hansen

Intern Lindsey Conklin

Cover: South Boundary Avenue by Betsy Wilson-Mahoney

Copyright © 2019 University of Mary Hardin-Baylor Press Dr. Randy O’Rear, President & CEO Belton, Texas The Windhover is published twice a year, in February and August. Subscriptions are $22 (two issues). The most recent issue is $12. Back issues are $6.

For full submission guidelines, subscription and purchasing information, and samples of back issues, please visit The Windhover homepage:

http://undergrad.umhb.edu/english/windhover-journal

The Windhover is a proud member of CLMP (Community of Literary Magazines and Presses) CONTENTS

Kjerstin Anne Kauffman Inside Garden...... 1

Angie O’Neal God Speaks...... 2

Samuel Loncar Modernity & Hunger...... 3

Maryanne Hannan Sin...... 4

Joshua Hren Up and Down and Up Again...... 5

Chris Ellery Hillel...... 14

Matthew E. Henry [“Say justice is a dream deferred.”]...... 15

Carrie Heimer Fig...... 16

Kenneth Chacón Psalm 151...... 17

Rachel Hicks Disaster Chaplaincy Training...... 18

Philip Cioffari The Silence at the Heart of All Things...... 20

D.S. Martin A Poet Available for God’s Service...... 33 Lawrence O’Brien A Prayer for All Saints’ Day...... 34

Ed Higgins Reversal...... 35

Christine Higgins Jesus Supports the Artistry of the Special Needs...... 36

Gregory Emilio Saying Grace Without Grace...... 37

Susan Cowger Learning the Lord’s Prayer...... 38

G.E. Kittredge Rocket Sled...... 39

Michael Lyle Lilly’s Room...... 45

David Wright Lenten Failure #1...... 46

Jennifer Davis Michael Carrying the Cross...... 47

Brian Cravens Egg Hunt...... 48

G.C. Waldrep Neither Ablaze with the Strength of Strong Lions nor Learned in Their Exhalations...... 53

Christine Boldt That Moment in San Vitale...... 54 Matthew Landrum Mournful Expectancy...... 55

David Athey A Psalm...... 56

Steven Wingate Jesus and the Beautiful Lady’s Hand...... 57

Sarah M. Wells Savasana...... 64

Claude Wilkinson Heaven and Earth...... 66

Marjorie Maddox School Bus Route 23...... 68

Mark D. Bennion Holding Your Hand in Bed...... 69

Dante Di Stefano For My Wife on Her First Mother’s Day...... 70

Marci Rae Johnson Slow Rapture...... 71

Janet McCann Redemption...... 72

Contributors...... 74 KJERSTIN ANNE KAUFFMAN

Inside Garden

It’s spring. Let me plant you a garden as would Shakespeare—from Midsummer’s Dream— and teach you forgotten names: oxlip, muskrose, woodbine, eglantine. Or just let me conjure from this earth I bought at Ace, and spooned freely into plastic trays with crackling tops—one compostable, one, for measure, not— the colors of the wet sky, magic as the hunters hold in the book of myths we read last night, bright as the sign—you know it—God of good clean starts provided us, the humans who survived. Watch me water these tweezer-transferred seeds until they spark, and you shall hear snapdragons roar what your eye hath not heard, nor ear seen, and these dank delphiniums harbored in the dark shall not stay hid but burst from their coffee-filter beds— Let me raise my head. I, who thinking of poets think also of burdock, hemlock, and idle weeds. Who never could speak plain and say that I’ve lost some phantom dream. And yet I am filled with love. Every morning your faces garden up. And beyond any book I could play or read, they brim and mean. Face me. You mean, you mean.

1 RACHEL HICKS

Disaster Chaplaincy Training

For a compassionate person nothing human is alien: no joy and no sorrow, no way of living and no way of dying. —Henri Nouwen

Loiter with intent (in steel-soled boots when necessary), our instructor tells us.

Partially blind from weeks of Ground Zero asbestos, she says:

Hover approachably in the aftermath. Learn to be present in suffering— acclimate to its pungency, its yellow, acrid scent.

Sit with victims in their grief and shock on the broken curb, under a tarp, if available.

Distribute cups of water— this is your spiritual service.

Perception of safety is critical. Let kids solve puzzles. Restore balance with simple questions: what color was your house?

You are midwives birthing new realities, she says—everything has changed.

18 Let them see you cupping a small ball of hope—toss it up, catch it.

Finally: Nouwen calls us wounded healers. Know your own tipping point.

Don’t let their story become your story. Hydrate.

19 ED HIGGINS

Reversal

Jonah would laugh, no doubt, at this miracle of reversal:

Jesus, fish of God, now swallowed in human flesh: God in us, digested— spirit calories feeding hunger cells with sonship, until finally, Jonah-like, we, too, turn toward Nineveh, imperfect messengers filled with wine-blood love, and bread-broken redemption.

35 SUSAN COWGER

Learning the Lord’s Prayer

Come now your kingdom please let it be Montana or heaven or something like that Sandstone palisades an icy lake above timberline Reflecting your face is this what you’re thinking I’m thinking of the Pryor Mountains just there Along the horizon to the south elongated blue A little bluer than sky I’m seeing heaven on earth Manageable at a distance but immovable The way prayer feels like a promise Racing through the prairie sage The only place left where one can capture and keep Wild horses Daddy said do it And it was ours He didn’t blink or snigger though I imagine some mirth In the power of yes Yes smack in the face of no way in hell It was up to me and it still feels that way Like he wants it hopes I’ll give it a go

38 BRIAN CRAVENS

Egg Hunt

He spent the first twenty-five minutes watching them from behind a gathering of ancient oak trees. He then spent another ten minutes silently scowling as the children played closer to the property line marked by the old wooden farm fence he and his father built in the decades before the children’s parents were even born. Some things were made to last, almost forever, he remembered his father telling him, hammering in a fence post while offering gospel to his eldest child. But you have to work hard to maintain it. As the eldest came responsibility with no lip. Just accept the birth order and you won’t get smacked. This his father also told him, after mutterings under the breath why his siblings weren’t out in the humid summer mornings as the sun slowly continued to rise over the horizon. Just do your duty. Duty breeds resentment, he learned. There are those who accept duty and others who view it anachronistically, a dated and silly product from an earlier time. But that wasn’t how he was raised. He was raised to accept duty and the responsibility that accompanies it. And the rest should respect it without question. And him. His younger siblings disagreed, especially his sister. She always had an attitude toward him and their father. No respect. He watched the children through eyes still sharp after seventy years of glaring. He made his weekly tour of the fence line, looking for rotted wood leaving gaps in the fence itself, when he noticed them. The girls’ brightly colored spring dresses danced around hips not stricken by puberty and wouldn’t be for years to come. A splendid innocence still echoed from their movements, just like his daughters long ago. The boys’ Sunday-best showed signs of grass stains and muddy shoes. Their mothers would spend the day washing them and mending any tears. He smiled at the memory of his son who knew better than to waste an adult’s time cleaning up the aftermath of a holiday. Unlike his own, these children showed no respect for their parents. Typical, he thought. Some hollered on the television that today’s youth disparaged family. He agreed. Thinking about his own siblings and not his children, he suspected that youth rarely respected family and the hierarchical traditions that came with it. His father would have agreed with this sentiment had he not been buried twenty years earlier in a grave not too far from where children picked up colored eggs scattered about on the other side of the fence. 48 Easter Sunday and here these children were playing and not thinking deeply about the resurrection. Without it and the sacrifices of Jesus, where would our country be, his father drilled into him each Easter Sunday. How terrible our way of life would have turned out without this gift, his father declared. Sacrifice indeed. A sacrifice was essential to duty. Jesus understood his duty as God’s only Son. A sacrifice was made on that cross, his father prodded. You need to always remember your duty, boy, to me and your mother. To this family. Sacrifices. And this was how he lived for seventy years. It wasn’t that he disliked children. Certainly not. He had three children of his own and grandchildren who rarely visited. But he saw them enough. In fact, two of his grandsons were hunting for Easter eggs on the other side of the fence. His sister’s inherited property. Strong fences make for more distant neighbors he once heard. As he scanned the fence line for any wayward colored eggs as the gaggle of loud, screaming children grew closer, he doubted this saying. Strong fences only make more distant neighbors if those on the other side respect the property of those on this side. He grunted and nodded. If she hadn’t written that stupid book. A little blonde girl in pigtails and a green dress skipped over the grass and toward the old fence. A bright pink basket overfilled with plastic eggs bounced alongside her, ejecting newly discovered treasures recovered away from the screaming children. Ahead lay a blue plastic egg at the bottom of a fledgling pecan tree. He watched her excitement grew, oblivious to the fact that it wasn’t quality she sought, but quantity. The more plastic eggs with cheap candy inside, the better. He shook his head. No appreciation anymore. For anything. Still, he remembered his own little girl at that age and the quiet thrill seeing her run down the stairs Christmas morning. Or even Easter Sunday. Discarded memories sometimes resurfaced at the worst possible times. The little blonde girl bent down and stole quick glances around her before grabbing the blue plastic egg and tossing it into her basket. Eager and excited shouts rang loudly from nearby children. Seeing the jettisoned eggs around her, she began picking them up while scanning for any rivals. As she placed the plastic eggs in her overfilled basket, other eggs fell out. Hearing the screams and distinct voices move closer, she popped open several of the plastic eggs, unwrapped any chocolates, and shoved them into her mouth. Just like my sister, he chuckled, watching the blonde girl’s cheeks balloon in size. Always wants more than her share. This was also his take on his sister’s published novel twenty years earlier. Just after their father passed. He read

49 it carefully, cover to cover, taking in every little detail that lay hidden to everyone but him. Even annotated along the margins. Underlined key passages and phrases he recognized as coming from their father. Or him. She couldn’t fool him. She wasn’t as smart as she believed. That university degree was just a piece of paper. Likely framed on a wall somewhere in her house down the hill. That type of learning didn’t offer much but show she had read a few books. Hell, he read books too. Like hers. Change a few names and events around in the novel and it’s their family. Their story. Their private history. The locals who read it caught on, either fully or filling in the blank spots with their own salacious assumptions and gossip. The rest of the country, including those who gave her novel that big literary prize, just saw it as a good story. But he knew better. She always wants more than her share. Some things never change. Didn’t want the land, but wanted a better father. Couldn’t accept him for who he was. Hell, she hasn’t been to his grave since he died. But she took the land in the end. He felt his skin grow warm like a slowly heating oven. Shoulders and neck tensed. Fists clenched. I can accept what she wrote about me, but not what she wrote about our father. His sister yelled back when he confronted her. Both had tempers bequeathed to them by their father, their mother often quipped. “Two hotheads when it’s already too hot around here,” she would mutter aloud, shaking her head as she shuffled out of the kitchen or living room and away from the sibling drama. They’d always feuded. At one time, after their father’s passing, he was even ready to call the feud quits and be the better person, the bigger person, the older brother. But then that damn book published and any good grace he felt toward his little sister evaporated when he read the title. Sins of the Father. Nothing surprised him about her anymore, and he regretted reconsidering his feelings and maybe ending the feud. The title of her novel wasn’t just a poke but a slap in his face, and his father’s too. The audacity of his sister to dishonor their father’s memory and desecrate his soul. It was too much for him to bear. So that Thanksgiving, the last time the family sat and broke bread together, both brother and sister yelled and reminded the other of past sins, both real and perceived. Before the mashed potatoes finished its virginal circuit around the broad family table, the accusations lobbied across. First they were limited to tone

50 and glacial triggers whose intent lurked below the surface. The air around the table shrunk and stilled. He escalated first, charging her over veiled yet poorly hidden attacks on his wife and children. She replied that novels aren’t always reflections of real life. Then he fired another shot on the portrayal of the novel’s patriarch. She parried with the argument that not everything in a book is inspired by the author’s actual experiences. Then he revealed his ace that assured their mutually assured destruction: how poorly written whole chapters of her novel were. Didn’t she at least have some editing done before publication? The color flushed away from her face before exploding crimson, followed by a curse that shook the room. That was the last moment they spent together as a family. A loud choking sound brought him back to the present day and away from the family drama of the past. The little blonde girl in pigtails and a green dress knelt on the grass, her pale face blue as the brilliant sky above. Her body lurched with each spasmic cough, trying to expel the obstruction preventing her from breathing. A single high pitched scream from another little girl signaled a torrent of other screams as some children rushed toward the little blond girl while others ran for help. The memory of the past extinguished like a snuffed candle flame leaving only dissipating resentments as the old man ran toward the wooden fence. A lifetime of nearly all-day labor gifted him wiry muscles as he climbed over the fence and to the girl. The stray thought of remembering the last time he was on his sister’s property quickly swept away in the moment as he wrapped his arms around the girl and pulled against her sternum. A glob of chocolate followed by another shot out of her mouth, allowing shallow and then deep and full breaths of air to enter her lungs. A loud commotion rose up over the hill and he saw his sister, still spry even for her advancing age, outpacing all but the fastest of children. A gaggle of adults followed her. He looked down at the girl, wobbly on her legs. Tugging at her pigtail, she looked up with wide eyes at the stranger behind her. He waved his hand toward the rush of adults signaling her to go to them. As she ran off, his sister stood before him, eyes still glassy from crying. “Thank you,” she said. He nodded and turned back toward the fence line. “She’s my niece, John. Would you like to meet her and everyone else?” He paused, seemingly to consider her offer, then shook his head.

51 “C’mon, John. Let’s put it all behind us. For today of all days. This one day.” He shook his head once more before climbing over the fence. There would be no resurrection of family or of good will. Not on today of all days.

52 STEVEN WINGATE

Jesus and the Beautiful Lady’s Hand

Some days I want to drop everything else in my life and write a book about the relationship between Christianity and the Chinese meditative and martial art of t’ai chi ch’uan, even though I’m not an expert in either. I would have to transform myself into another person to write this book: less bound up in my own spiritual weakness, less pained by old ice hockey injuries that grow worse with age, less hamstrung by angers and anxieties that make my muscles dry and brittle. The person I am now does not feel enough ease inside him to write such a book. He is ill at ease. Peeling back the layers of his skin and looking inside him, I might even say that he is dis-eased. But he is not a lost cause. The clearest path forward from thedis -eased him to the I who moves fluidly through the world runs through both Christianity and t’ai chi, the traditions that have been responsible for the only two times in my life that I have ever felt ease completely and absolutely. The first moment of ease came at a memorial Mass for Saint Pope John Paul II when he died in 2005. I stood at the end of a pew during the Our Father, and the person across the aisle from me was too far away to reach. I held my hand out anyway and felt John Paul II holding it throughout the prayer, and I have never felt so whole—so at peace, so at one with every speck of creation—before or since. He didn’t hold my hand as if I were special, or as if he wanted to send a just-for-me message. This was simply the kind of thing saints (and soon-to-be-saints) did. They saidDon’t be afraid. They saidTrust and you need not suffer. The second moment of ease came two years later during a t’ai chi class taught by the late Bataan Faigao, himself a student of Cheng Man-Ching, one of the foremost importers of t’ai chi to the United States. I was in the middle of a sequence of fluid, circular motions known as Grasping the Sparrow’s Tail that involves a particularly soft turning of the waist. When I made the turn that evening, all my hockey pains and my anger pains and my anxiety pains slipped away from me. I felt immensely rooted in the earth, as if I could not be separated from it, yet floated upon its surface with the perfect buoyancy of a happy rubber duck. Having experienced these two moments of ease, I now desire a third one, and I know the perfect scenario for it. I’ll be in my kitchen at dawn doing t’ai chi and I’ll struggle, as always, with the principle of the Beautiful Lady’s Hand 57 during the position called Single Whip. In this position, my right hand extends slightly behind my shoulder with my thumb and first two fingers together, as if I’m holding a wet bag of tea. My left leg, frontmost, carries the bulk of my weight, and my left arm is shoulder-height, bent at a ninety-ish degree angle. My left hand, floating in front of my shoulder, should be that of a Beautiful Lady, though I never seem to get it right. A proper Beautiful Lady’s Hand is held straight but yielding, with the wrist unbent but not stiff: a calm arrow from elbow to fingertips. This hand is not clenched, not poised to strike; it is soft and weightless, yet ready to redirect attacking energy without using much energy of its own. Whenever my teachers have come around to correct my Single Whip, they’ve always touched my left hand and told me to soften it. I keep my wrist too stiff, as if I’m trying to prevent a force from pushing it back rather than allowing that force to connect with me so I can guide it. On the imaginary morning of my third moment of absolute ease, I’ll feel my teacher heading over to correct my Single Whip and my Beautiful Lady’s Hand. When he reaches me I’ll see that this teacher is Jesus, working hard with his students as always because he never gives up our causes as lost. He’ll tell me a quick Softer without words, briefly running his fingertips from my wrist bone to the top knuckle of my pinky, and I will understand the Beautiful Lady’s Hand at last. * * * These real and imaginary moments of ease are stored inside me, living together in the place where our early ancestors first wondered why we are here on earth, why we die, why we are born. It’s a place we all carry inside us, whether we recognize it or not—and whether we like it or not. In this ancestral place, before our deities even had names, our desire for oneness with creation was expressed in the actions of the body: in burying the dead, in human sacrifice, in ritual alteration of the skin, in dance-induced trances. The human body is a vessel for encountering the spirit, and our bodies—by being born, by coupling with one another, by fighting over things we need and things we don’t—continually invite us to ask those same questions our ancestors did. How do we prepare ourselves for sacrifice? Where does the spirit that once lived inside the dead body go? What must we do to ensure that this spirit goes to the place of ease after death, rather than the place of dis-ease? Catholicism—the species of Christianity that I practice—understands that our spiritual questions are rooted in the body. When you walk into a

58 Catholic church, you’ll find a man on a cross with real flesh and real wounds who suffered a real physical death. Yet the Catholic tradition of my youth didn’t talk much about the human body; it was what made us sin, and it had to be prevented from leaping gleefully into sin by fear of punishment. (This was in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the church’s relationship to the body seemed to consist of merely trying to stem the tide of the sexual revolution.) The Catholic writings which presented the body as an active participant in the spiritual experience—John Paul II’s papal lectures that would become Theology of the Body—were still years from being penned, let alone promulgated. But in my young adulthood, two monks who encountered Eastern religious traditions helped me understand how we experience the soul through the body, preparing me for the encounter between Catholicism and t’ai chi that shapes my spiritual life today. The first was a French Benedictine named Jean Déchanet whom I met—not in person but through his book Christian Yoga, written in 1956 and translated into English in 1960—in a Florida book shop window when I was twenty-six. Déchanet, an epileptic since childhood, described how yoga transformed his debilitated body while strengthening his connection to Christ. He wrote of how “a Yoga that calms the senses, pacifies the soul, and frees certain intuitive or affective powers in us can be of inestimable service to the West. It can make people into true Christians, dynamic and open, by helping them to be men.” He also said that “The exercises of Yoga clarify the relationship between body and soul,” and suggested that it might aid in “the unfolding in man of the grace of our Lord.” Thatunfolding sounded perfect to me then, as I was quite folded up into myself: a bit into yoga and a bit into Christianity, a typical twentysomething who dabbled in spiritual things and retreated when they demanded too much of him. Both traditions served a palliative function at the time, not a formative one; yoga helped with my physical pain and Christianity with my psychic, but I didn’t dig into either one fervently enough to humble myself to it. Yet the idea of finding a deep connection to the soulthrough the body—an “agreement,” as Déchanet called it—drew me in because I understood that, since we are bodily creatures, only through my body could I experience my soul. Only through the things that gave me pain and led me to sin could I find something like peace. I read Déchanet's book eagerly and held onto my copy for decades, finally giving it to a yoga teacher interested in how her practice intersected with the Christianity of her youth. (I hope by now she’s passed it on to someone else who needs it.) After exposing myself to Christian Yoga, I kept on exploring

59 the soul/body agreement. I continued to dabble in Eastern religions, like so many young artists and intellectuals of my day (and of this day) who grew up Christian but stepped away from their faith in search of something that seemed more contemporary. My dabbling led me to Zen; I read D.T. Suzuki and Alan Watts and tried, in my quest to understand the bodily soul, to meditate. I didn’t dig fervently enough in the mine of Zen, either. Then, just before I turned thirty, I met another monk in a bookshop window: the Trappist Thomas Merton, who dedicated much of his life to exploring the connection between Eastern religions and Christianity. Mystics and Zen Masters (1967) and Zen and the Birds of Appetite (1968) first drew me in, and the way Merton compared the Zen concept of emptiness to the Christian concept of poverty of spirit led me back toward the church of my youth. It taught me that everything I’d been looking for in Eastern religions had been there all along in the Catholicism I grew up with, merely hidden beneath the wrappings of a conventional wisdom that saw the body as something in the way, something that had to be tamed and overcome. It was the third Merton book I read, The Way of Chuang Tzu (1965), that ultimately led me down the path to t’ai chi. Merton described this book as “free interpretive readings” of resonant passages in the work of Chuang Tzu (370- 287 B.C.), drawn from his own comparison of translations of the original into English, German, and French. I have owned six copies of this book and given five away to friends the instant they showed interest in it. Chuang Tzu, typically known today as Zhuangzi, stands as a transitional figure in world religious history. It is partly through Chuang Tzu that we know Lao Tzu (a.k.a. Laozi), the perhaps mythological father of Taoism and putative author of the Tao Te Ching. The Taoist line flows, via Chuang Tzu, into what we call Zen Buddhism today. It emphasizes serenity and harmony with the earth, a long and generous take on human life instead of a short and acquisitive one, and the balance between yin energy (transformative and outwardly directed) and yang energy (stabilizing and inwardly focused). Two practices recently adopted by the West, qigong and feng shui, are, like t’ai chi, fundamentally Taoist in nature. Among Taoism’s central tenets—which it shares with most Chinese martial and medical traditions—is the idea of chi, the vital energy that flows through all living things. Some might call it atman, some prana, some God’s love, some Holy Spirit. Whatever name we use for it, we are surrounded by it at all times; how we treat it is a matter of our own free will.

60 In Merton’s introduction to The Way of Chuang Tzu stands the line that blew my mind: “For Chuang Tzu, as for the Gospel, to lose one’s life is to save it, and to seek to save it for one’s own sake is to lose it.” There it was! The emptiness, the poverty of spirit, the initial gap that our ancestors noticed between us and what gave us life! It was the fundamental conundrum of faith, and in Merton’s encounter with Chuang Tzu I discovered a new way that my species could express it. But what really got me came later in the introduction:

For Chuang Tzu, the truly great man is therefore not the man who has, by a lifetime of study and practice, accumulated a great fund of virtue and merit, but the man in whom “Tao acts without impediment.”

Substitute God’s love for Ta o in this passage, and we see unmistakably the Christian ideal: becoming a person in whom God’s love acts without impediment. Armed with this understanding from Merton and Chuang Tzu, my dabbling ended and I returned—slowly and cautiously, but steadfast and reinvigorated—to Catholicism. I found in it a deeply physical religion, and not only through the pierced and bleeding man on the cross who lives in every church I enter. Not only in the body and blood of Communion, which I had heard both atheists and fundamentalists deride as a form of cannibalism. I understood why we kneel, why we fast (though I am terrible at fasting), why we cross ourselves, why we give ourselves to each other in the sacrament of marriage and the joy of procreation. It’s because the body and soul have always had an agreement, and we all must come to terms with it. After a decade of dabbling and searching and scrounging, I had found terms that I could understand and embrace. * * * Going back to the church—and eventually getting confirmed, after having missed my first opportunity as a teenager—didn’t stop me from exploring Taoism further. At the time I was living in the hotbed of alternative spirituality known as Boulder, Colorado, and I started studying t’ai chi in the hope of steeping myself in it the way Jean Déchanet had steeped himself in yoga. In truth I was (and am) slightly more than a dabbler, though t’ai chi is the strongest dabble of my life. Most days—the best of my days—I devote time to performing a set of movements known as the First Third, a part of the “short form” developed by Cheng Man-Ching. (One of Professor Cheng’s master students, Benjamin Pang-Jeng Lo, suggested that I limit myself to this gentle

61 cycle because of my surgically repaired knee and back.) When I start my First Third, I face the back sliding door of my kitchen and align the center of my chest with a crepe paper cross that my youngest son made in preschool. It’s a good way to remind myself that I’m not doing t’ai chi to follow the Tao, or to further explore Eastern religions, but to sink myself deeper into Christianity through an increased awareness and love for my physical being—to unfold and become more dynamic and open, as Déchanet would say, so that God’s love might act in me without impediment. I have an enormously long way to go toward that goal, and my continuing difficulties with something as simple as the First Third remind me of this continuously. I have trouble balancing on my left foot and trouble shifting my weight without leaning. I have trouble letting my weight sink down through the bottoms of my feet—“sinking the root,” as it’s called. I have trouble, as always, with the Beautiful Lady’s Hand. I have trouble not getting angry at people I love, trouble feeling God’s love for myself (let alone for others), trouble recognizing the goodness in my neighbor, trouble finding hope. The troubles of my body and the troubles of my soul are one, and the solution to both is the same: find the place where God’s love flows freely and hold it, praying that whatever open channels I am able to find within myself will stay open, and not close themselves off the minute I feel greed or lust or resentment or bitterness at the only embodied life I will ever have. We sin with the body, yet we also reach toward the divine with the body. We are as stuck with the body as we are with the blunt instrument we call language. Neither Taoism nor Catholicism invite us to seek salvation in transcendence from the physical; they instead invite us to seek it in an ever- further and ever more accepting sinking of the self into the physical truth of life. We are called to be rooted in this world—to sink our roots—and to embrace the agreement we must make between body and soul. No moment in the Catholic Mass captures this agreement for me more fully than a line that occurs just before the Sanctus and the Mystery of Faith. “Lift up your hearts,” the priest says, and the congregation replies, “We lift them up to the Lord.” Every time this exchange happens, I lift not my metaphorical heart but my physical one, adjusting my posture just as I would during t’ai chi. I loosen my shoulders, let my head rest more gently on my neck, and visualize my spine as a string of pearls suspended from above by a connection at the crown of my head—as my t’ai chi teachers taught me. When these pearls hang freely, I feel balanced and calm. The meat of my body hangs lightly on my bones,

62 moves smoothly within my skin. When the pearls do not hang freely, I fall into disorder, tightness, anxiety, brittleness. The Taoist tradition doesn’t say who’s holding onto that string from above, but the Christian one would say that it’s God. So when I lift up my heart at Mass and feel that string of pearls, feel that connection on the crown of my head, I trust that at the far end of it is a God who completely supports me. This simple motion, embedded in the church’s primal rite, is a tonic for being “downhearted”—slumped over the self, steadfastly refusing to let chi or atman or prana or God’s love or Holy Spirit flow through us without impediment. Whatever name it has been called by, and whatever name it may be called by in the future, it is God’s love, and it is our responsibility to keep that energy flowing within andamong ourselves. That’s what I focus on when I start each First Third by lining myself up with my son’s awkward yet beautiful paper cross. I am here to keep God’s love flowing on earth in whatever circumstances I am placed. This is my only true task, and I must stick with it even if I fail continuously. Everything else: vanity. For Chuang Tzu, as for the Gospel, to lose one’s life is to save it, and to seek to save it for one’s own sake is to lose it. I will be judged for how fully and sincerely I remove the impediments to God’s love that I create inside me, and those I create outside myself for others. On the day when my third moment of absolute ease finally comes, I will step to face the window, lining my heart up with the cross once again. I’ll let my breath clear out whatever anger and resentment it can, and let my meat hang off the bone. The movements will come slowly, patiently, because no one is timing me and slower is better. Moving as slowly as a cold reptile or a sloth, I’ll make my way through Grasping the Sparrow’s Tail toward Single whip, where I’ll once again fail to sink my root properly. Once again lean so that my spine is out of center, once again hold tension in my Beautiful Lady’s Hand where it does not belong. Once again I’ll hold the position and wait for Jesus to correct it, and on this third day he will come. The tension isn’t in my hand at all, he knows, but in a single spot on my shoulder where I hold all my shame. He’ll brush it away as if flicking a crumb off my skin, then run his fingertips from my wrist bone to the top knuckle of my pinky. Then I’ll sink my root as far as I can into this home called earth and pray to love the life I’ve been given by letting it serve God and not myself. I will say: Thank you, teacher. I will say: Show me how to let your love flow through me always. I will say: Show me how to block it no more.

63 CONTRIBUTORS

DAVID ATHEY’s poems and stories have appeared in various journals, including The Windhover, Iowa Review, Southern Humanities Review, Harvard Review, and Tampa Review. He teaches creative writing at Palm Beach Atlantic University.

MARK D. BENNION’s work has appeared in The Comstock Review, Dappled Things, The Lyric, RHINO, Spiritus, and The Windhover. He’s the author of two previous poetry collections: Psalm & Selah: a poetic journey through the Book of Mormon (Parables, 2009) and Forsythia (Aldrich Press, 2013). He currently teaches writing and literature at BYU-Idaho.

CHRISTINE BOLDT, a retired librarian, has lived in Texas for thirty-eight years. She was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Nigeria in the 1960s, and lived in Italy during the 1970s. Her poetry has appeared in The Christian Century, The Windhover, Texas Poetry Calendar, and Adam, Eve and the Riders of the Apocalypse. Her collection Missing, One Muse: The Poetry of Sylvia St. Stevens was selected as the winner of the 2018 ASPS Morris Memorial Chapbook Competition.

KENNETH CHACÓN is a native of Fresno, California, where he spent his youth involved in gangs and drugs. By the grace of God, he became educated and escaped the madness. He received his BA in creative writing and his MFA in poetry from Fresno State. His work has appeared in Cimmaron Review, Poetry Quarterly, BorderSenses, Zetetic, and Huizache among others. He lives with his wife and children and teaches at Fresno City College. His collection of poetry, The Cholo Who Said Nothing, was published in January 2017.

PHILIP CIOFFARI is a novelist, playwright, and filmmaker. He is a professor of English at William Paterson University in New Jersey. His website is www. philipcioffari.com.

SUSAN COWGER’s chapbook, Scarab Hiding, was released December 2006. Susan’s work is forthcoming in Adanna Literary Journal and Perspectives Journal. Her work has most recently appeared in CRUX, Poem-a Week, allWeCanHold. com (Sage Hill Press), McGuffin, Wising Up Anthology on Joy, and The 55 Project. Susan is founder and past editor of Rock & Sling.

74 BRIAN CRAVENS is a full-time government professor at a small community college in central Texas. When not writing, grading stacks of essays, and drinking copious and dangerous amounts of coffee, he travels to Southeast Asia, Europe, Central and South America, Turkey, Iceland, and most recently, Egypt. He also owns a cat with travel aspirations of her own.

DANTE DI STEFANO is the author of two poetry collections: Love Is a Stone Endlessly in Flight (Brighthorse Books, 2016) and Ill Angels (Etruscan Press, forthcoming 2019). His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in Prairie Schooner, The Sewanee Review, The Writer’s Chronicle, and elsewhere. He lives in Endwell, New York, with his wife, Christina, their daughter, Luciana, and their dog, Sunny.

CHRIS ELLERY is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently Canticles of the Body (Resource Publications, 2018). He has received the X.J. Kennedy Award for Creative Nonfiction, the Alexander and Dora Raynes Poetry Prize, and the Betsy Colquitt Award. Ellery was a Fulbright professor in American literature at the University of Aleppo, Syria, 1999-2000. He is a member of the Texas Association of Creative Writing Teachers, Phi Kappa Phi, and the Texas Institute of Letters.

GREGORY EMILIO’s poetry and essays have appeared in Midwestern Gothic, Permafrost, Pleiades, Spoon River Poetry Review, The Poet’s Billow, and World Literature Today. Recently, he was selected for the 2018 Best New Poets anthology. He’s the Nonfiction Editor atNew South, and a PhD candidate in English at Georgia State University in Atlanta.

MARYANNE HANNAN has published poetry in Adanna, Gargoyle, minnesota review, Oxford Poetry, Rabbit, Rattle, The Windhover, and Womens Art Quarterly. Several poems have been reprinted in anthologies, including The Great American Wise Ass Poetry Anthology and The World Is Charged: Poetic Engagements with Gerard Manley Hopkins. She lives in upstate New York.

CARRIE HEIMER writes and teaches in Fairbanks, Alaska. Her poetry has also appeared in The Comstock Review, Rock & Sling, Relief, and Dappled Things. Her advent devotional, The Other Stars Hover & Wait, is available for order at blurb. com, or through her website: poetryissalt.com.

75 MATTHEW E. HENRY is a Pushcart Nominee with works appearing in various publications, including The Anglican Theological Review, The Other Journal, Poetry East, Relief, and Rock & Sling. He is an educator who received his MFA from Seattle Pacific University, yet continued to spend money he didn’t have pursuing a MA in theology and a PhD in education.

RACHEL HICKS’s poetry has appeared in Little Patuxent Review, Relief, St. Katherine Review, Off the Coast, Gulf Stream, and other literary journals. Her poetry has placed second in two state-wide contests in Maryland, and she served as the 2018 Poetry Out Loud Regional Coordinator for the Maryland State Arts Council. After living in eight countries—most recently China—she now resides in Baltimore, where she also writes essays and fiction and works as a freelance copyeditor. Find her online at rachelehicks.com.

CHRISTINE HIGGINS is a McDowell Colony fellow and the recipient of an Individual Artist Award in both Poetry and Nonfiction from The Maryland State Arts Council. Her work has appeared in numerous journals, including Pequod, Little Patuxent Review, Lullwater Review, and Naugatuck River Review. She is the author of three poetry books: Threshold, Plum Point Folio, and In the Margins.

ED HIGGINS’s poems and short fiction have appeared in various print and online journals including recently Peacock Journal, Uut Poetry, Triggerfish Critical Review, and Tigershark Magazine, among others. Ed is Asstistant Fiction Editor for Ireland-based Brilliant Flash Fiction and Writer-in-Residence at George Fox University (where he is also Professor Emeritus in the English Department).

JOSHUA HREN teaches fiction writing and literature and philosophy at Belmont Abbey College, where he is the assistant director of the Honors College. He has published poetry and fiction in a number of literary and other magazines. His first collection of short stories,This Our Exile, was published by Angelico Press in January of 2018, and his first academic book,Middle- earth and the Return of the Common Good, was published by Cascade Books in October of 2018.

76 MARCI RAE JOHNSON is a freelance writer and editor. She’s also the Poetry Editor for The Cresset and WordFarm press. Her poems appear in Main Street Rag, The Collagist, Rhino, Quiddity, Hobart, Redivider, Louisville Review, and 32 Poems, among others. Her first collection of poetry won the Powder Horn Prize and was published by Sage Hill Press in 2013; her second full length collection, Basic Disaster Supplies Kit, was released by Steel Toe Books in 2016.

KJERSTIN ANNE KAUFMANN holds an MFA from Johns Hopkins University and has taught creative writing both there and at Hillsdale College in Michigan. Her poems appear in a number of periodicals, including 32 Poems, Gulf Coast, Mezzo Cammin, and THRUSH. Her essays and reviews appear widely as well, in venues such as The Cresset, Literary Matters (Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers) and The American Poetry Review.

G.E. KITTREDGE has published poetry and creative nonfiction, under a different name, in several publications.

MATTHEW LANDRUM holds an MFA from Bennington. His work has recently appeared in Agni, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Image. He was Ruminate Journal’s Best New Poet nominee for 2017. He lives in Detroit.

SAMUEL LONCAR is a poet with Japanese, Ojibwe, and Croatian roots. He is a scholar of religion, and believes that the sacred can only exist beside the secular. His most recent collection of poems explores and reclaims the gods of his Japanese grandmother and Native American grandfather. Most recently, he was selected to write for Tupelo 30/30, and he was a participant at Kenyon Review’s spiritual writing workshop with Afaa Weaver.

MICHAEL LYLE has always written, but he’s also been a producer/director at a television station, an English teacher, and an ordained minister. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Canary, The Carolina Quarterly, Dappled Things, Euphony, The Hollins Critic, and other journals. Two of his essays were winners of the Buechner Narrative Writing Project and published in The Christian Century. Michael lives in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia and his first chapbook, The Everywhere of Light, came out in 2018 from Plan B Press. His website is www.michaellylewriter.com.

77 MARJORIE MADDOX is Professor of English and Creative Writing at Lock Haven University. She has published eleven poetry collections, including True, False, None of the Above (Poeima Poetry Series, Illumination Book Award Medalist); Local News from Someplace Else; Wives’ Tales; Transplant, Transport, Transubstantiation (2004 Yellowglen Prize; re-release 2018); and Perpendicular As I (Sandstone Book Award). She has also published the short story collection What She Was Saying (Fomite Press) and four children’s books. Her website is www.marjoriemaddox.com.

D.S. MARTIN is the author of four poetry collections, including Ampersand and Conspiracy of Light: Poems Inspired by the Legacy of C.S. Lewis (both from Cascade). He is Series Editor for the Poiema Poetry Series from Cascade Books, and editor of two anthologies: The Turning Aside, and Adam, Eve, & the Riders of the Apocalypse. He is Poet-in-Residence at McMaster Divinity College.

JANET MCCANN’s poetry has been published in Kansas Quarterly, Parnassus, Nimrod, Sou’wester, and New York Quarterly, among others. A 1989 NEA Creative Writing Fellowship winner, she has taught at Texas A & M University since 1969. She has co-edited two anthologies, Odd Angles of Heaven (1994) and Place of Passage (2000). She has coauthored two textbooks and written a book on Wallace Stevens: The Celestial Possible: Wallace Stevens Revisited (1996). Her most recent poetry collection is The Crone at the Casino (Lamar University Press, 2013).

JENNIFER DAVIS MICHAEL is professor and chair of English at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, specializing in British Romanticism. Her poems have appeared in Southern Poetry Review, Cumberland River Review, Leaping Clear, The New Verse News, and Mezzo Cammin, among others. She has also published a book of criticism, Blake and the City (Bucknell, 2006).

LAWRENCE O’BRIEN is the former editor of Common Ground Review, the international poetry journal of Western New England University in Springfield, Massachusetts. His poetry collection, The White Hydrangeas, was published recently by Aldrich Press.

78 ANGIE O’NEAL’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Psaltery & Lyre, Perspectives Journal, Cumberland River Review, San Pedro River Review, Stirring: A Literary Collection, and elsewhere. Her chapbook, The Way Things Fall, was published by Anchor & Plume Press in 2017. She holds the Joan Alden Speidel Chair in English at Shorter University in Rome, Georgia, where she lives with her daughters.

G.C. WALDREP is the author most recently of feast gently (Tupelo, 2018) and the long poem Testament (BOA Editions, 2015). He lives in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, where he teaches at Bucknell University and edits the journal West Branch. From 2007 to 2018 he served as Editor-at-Large for The Kenyon Review. [Note: the title of his poem derives from a translation of Hildegard.]

SARAH M. WELLS is the author of The Family Bible Devotional (2018), the poetry collection Pruning Burning Bushes, and a chapbook of poems, Acquiesce. Essays published in Ascent, Brevity, The Pinch, River Teeth, and Under the Gum Tree have been honored as Notable Essays in Best American Essays 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2017, and 2018. She is the recipient of an Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council. Wells is the Director of Content Marketing for Spire Advertising and lives in Ashland, Ohio, with her husband and three children.

CLAUDE WILKINSON is a critic, essayist, painter, and poet. His collections include Reading the Earth, winner of the Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award, and Joy in the Morning, which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. His most recent book, Marvelous Light, was published by Stephen F. Austin State University Press.

STEVEN WINGATE is a multi-genre author whose work ranges from poetry to gaming. His books include the short story collection Wifeshopping (2008) and the novel Of Fathers and Fire, forthcoming from the University of Nebraska Press. He has taught at the University of Colorado, the College of the Holy Cross, and South Dakota State University, where he is currently associate professor of English.

79 DAVID WRIGHT teaches creative writing and American literature at Monmouth College (Illinois). His poems have appeared in Image, Ecotone, Poetry East, and Hobart, among others. His most recent poetry collection is The Small Books of Bach (Wipf & Stock, 2014). He can be found on Twitter @sweatervestboy.

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CONTRIBUTORS David Athey Matthew E. Henry D.S. Martin

Mark D. Bennion Rachel Hicks Janet McCann

Christine Boldt Christine Higgins Jennifer Davis Michael

Kenneth Chacón Ed Higgins Lawrence O’Brien

Philip Cioffari Joshua Hren Angie O’Neal

Susan Cowger Marci Rae Johnson G.C. Waldrep

Brian Cravens Kjerstin Anne Kauffman Sarah M. Wells

Dante Di Stefano G.E. Kittredge Claude Wilkinson

Chris Ellery Matthew Landrum Betsy Wilson-Mahoney

Gregory Emilio Samuel Loncar Steven Wingate

Maryanne Hannan Michael Lyle David Wright

Carrie Heimer Marjorie Maddox