ISSUE 22 | NOV 2012

PARADISE

Michelle Bentsman

Earth of my Earth, Flesh of my Flesh

I sang to geese and petted tree trunks - bringing the special ones together and making them specialer - God plants a garden - the body is a lifelong charge - spongy lining of a soil belly - fruit teeth, fruit tongue - it was like He said - « Between my body and the day »

Michael Kinnucan

Forgiveness

« why not me? » - disaster movies - police and cowardice - a market for forgiveness - an older logic - the same choice every day - partners in crime - vile housekeeping - an innocent victim - drink His blood

Amy Leavitt

Purgatorio, A Farm

nailed to the crosspiece - an Old Iranian root - prisons, ghettoes, and gated communities - those delicate differences that bespeak individuality - unmarriageable - « someday, my shit won’t smell » - we plow - we prop - we flaunt - we teeter - we mulch

Steven Michalkow

Paradise in Conflict

a bone to pick - take his own career seriously - courting conflict - a premature curmudgeon - « All the News That's Fit to Print » - « what the hell is it supposed to mean unless it's as obviously complacent and conceited and censorious as it seems » - a land made of chocolate

Chris Neubert

Not Like Bangkok

Boxing Day Tsunami - cover up the warts and reveal the beaches - « Great Faces, Great Places » - « hiding in plain sight » - too soon! - a funny kind of paradise - « blasé » toward the whole region - a new form of war tourism - transactions of desire - the two of them just talked - an empathy moment

Tessa Cheek

Building Paradise: Design Bibles and Garden Homes

the promise of Eden - visual theology - large-format photographs - white-on-white salvation - less color, less clutter, less stuff - hinges on nothing less material than taste - the word ‘house’ for the physical container of a single-family unit - perversely modeled after a billboard - the end of history