After mass, you’d be in the back of the church, 
transforming from altar boy into just yourself, 
and you’d listen to the women in tight formation 

kneeling before the statue of Mary, 
chanting their rosary. You swear you could 
hear then (and still hear now) the need in some 

of their voices, that desperate, bottomless emptiness 
they were praying would finally go away, 
and in others there was a confidence 

and still others the dreaminess of their hope 
and the music of their voices together made you 
wish that you weren’t a closet doubter, who wasn’t 
sure about God but knew for a fact he was doomed. 

Plea Dream (mixed-media painting, 2023)

Copyrighted © by Jane Edberg. All rights reserved.
Image appears here with artist’s permission.

Jane Edberg

is a photographer, artist, teacher, and author who writes memoir, flash, poetry, and book reviews. Her work has appeared in Death and its Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Beautiful Lessons: Field Notes from The Death Dialogues Project (Motina Books, 2022), Cholla Needles, Worthing Flash, and Gyroscope Review, and is forthcoming in BAM’s 42 Stories Anthology. Her photo-illustrated memoir, The Fine Art of Grieving: Using Creativity to Process Death, Loss, and Grief, is available for publication.

Jane holds a Master of Fine Arts from the University of California, Davis, and currently teaches writing at California State University Monterey Bay’s OLLI Program. She is also Arts editor and writer for The Journal of Radical Wonder.

Artist’s website: https://www.janeedberg.com/

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Jane Edberg and John Brantingham talk about etymphrasis and ekphrasis! (19 March 2023), the first Zoom Craft Talk from The Journal of Radical Wonder

John Brantingham

was the first poet laureate of Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks (east of Fresno, CA), and now lives in Jamestown, New York. He is the founding editor of The Journal of Radical Wonder, and the author of 21 books of poetry, memoir, and fiction including his latest, Life: Orange to Pear (Bamboo Dart Press, 2020) and Kitkitdizzi (Bamboo Dart Press, 2022), the latter a collaboration which features artworks by his wife, Ann Brantingham.

John’s poems, stories, and essays are published in hundreds of magazines and journals. His work has appeared on Garrison Keillor’s daily show, The Writer’s Almanac; has been nominated multiple times for the Pushcart Prize; and was selected for publication in The Best Small Fictions anthology series for 2022 and 2016.

Author’s website: www.johnbrantingham.com/

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ A Walk Among Giants by Kendall Johnson, a review of John and Ann Brantingham’s book Kitkitdizzi: A Non-Linear Memoir of the High Sierra, in MacQueen’s Quinterly (Issue 16, January 2023)

⚡ Finnegan’s (Fiancée Goes McArthur Park on His Birthday) Cake, flash fiction by Brantingham in MacQueen’s Quinterly (Issue 9, August 2021), which was subsequently selected for publication in The Best Small Fictions 2022 anthology

⚡ Objects of Curiosity, a collection of his ekphrastic poems (Sasse Museum of Art, 2020)

⚡ For the Deer, one of two haibun by Brantingham in KYSO Flash (Issue 8, August 2017)

⚡ Four prose poems in Serving House Journal (Issue 7, Spring 2013), including A Man Stepping Into a River and Poem to the Child Who I Almost Adopted