Jack Kristiansen after Portrait of Paolo Morigia You’ve posed Morigia as bookish, as in his seventies but still busy with his reading and writing. He’s removed his glasses to study you while you study him. He doesn’t see you as Judith holding a sword and the head of Holofernes. No, he’s admiring an eighteen-year-old holding a brush and palette. He’s confident you’re painting a miracle. He’ll admire the crumpling of his...

Marc Petersen I am on my way to extinction, here, today, Christmas morning, my blanket spread out, my wine uncorked, lighting my first cigarette before the stone that says my father, and the tiny angel smiling on the granite roof, and those who have gone past their deaths in rows up along the banks of lawns and flowers–all anonymous, even though I know the names of those closest, and my sneakers are wet from walking. Marc Petersen...

Anne Champion Your death was the illusion of glitter smeared across a lake that vanishes as the sun dips under the horizon, while grief clanged within, subsiding the way ice melts in a glass of vodka: potent, transparent, dissolving clear against clear. I became nocturnal, searching in the crisp coldness of night sky, imagining you were the amnesia inducing warmth I sought to live in as the sun rose and I drifted to sleep. Life was not as...