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The Santa Who Laughs
Chantel Tattoli
There are faces of toast bearing your visage on Ebay. MARY IS MY HOMEGIRL tee shirts. A flash drive in your image Mary marketed for its capacity to keep 512 MB of data en womb: “Oh Maria, keep my data safe” engraved on your halo and your LED heart red-blinking while data transfers over. But you are too much a saint to mind it. Or maybe you’ve learned to take cruel jokes. That?
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Secret Oxygen
Kim Thomas
The firemen access our building invisibly. I thought they would stop coming because you summoned strength against them. I’m sure the firemen have instructions for seizures. Kept in a red tool chest. Explicitly labeled help. I’m sure others, like you, ask them to leave. I understand this fear of judgment, yet it is not enough.
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The Miracle: Lullaby for Lost Children
Melanie Rae Thon
Pink pyrola, trailing daisy—magenta flames of shooting stars, brilliant gold of glacier lilies.
Hush now, beloved.
The hummingbird comes to sip from foxglove and Sweet William, drinks from the hollyhock, opens the snapdragon.
Why are you afraid?
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Hello, Brain, It's Me
Ray Vukcevich
Hello, 90% of my brain which is totally, or at least mostly, inaccessible to consciousness, this is the part of us that thinks of itself as “Ray Vukcevich” although sometimes we suspect that part is really “Henry.” Would people have called him “Hank” if things had developed a little differently? What I’m wondering about today is Time. It's a subject that seems so simple at first but is not at all simple and probably has a lot to do with Everything. I’d like to run it by you. I hope you will have ideas. I hope you will tell me your ideas. If you do tell me the ideas you have, I’ll write them down. I’ll do my best not to misrepresent you. I promise. Please, please, talk to me.
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Practice
Ray Vukcevich
Meditation is hard. You try, you fail. There is that straight spine business, and the folding of the legs, and the breathing -- in and out, in and out, and the way words just keep poking their noses into your mental tent, dragging your attention away from the movement of air through one nostril or the other, sometimes both, all the aches and pains to ignore or embrace. Yes, it's a struggle, but the rewards are great -- the control of time itself, the wonderful realization that all the moments of your existence don't necessarily occur in any particular order. In fact, only this one occurs at all, and what do you mean by "moment" anyway? The word tickles your nose with a feather. You want to open your eyes. You try to blow away the feather with a small stream of air from your mouth. No good. You sneeze.
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Transubstance
Nicole Walker
The word morph sounds so soft but there is
tugging and there is pulling. The unsticking of legs
from the threads breaks any thoughts of grace.
On Earth As It Is was an online journal of prayer narratives, or dramatic monologues addressed to God, from writers of different faiths. From 2010-2012, the journal featured writers such as Melanie Rae Thon, Erin McGraw, Melissa Pritchard, Ken Baumann, and others.
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