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Witness Magazine

Why I Don’t Go to Church

By
Poetry•Vol. 34 No. 2
The priest          talks of gardens
but doesn’t grow fruit.

Oh, the mess     song

birds make. Someday

they will go to seed,
sprout,               and shoot.

A white lab mouse
released into the woods
doesn’t have the sense to run.
           Instinct

bred out,

it slips,               head first

like the priest into           collar and gold

embroidery with almond
nails, my grandmother   calls
lazy. The film of incense

           a tiny fire.               all of it

preserved prayer

           in the pellet            of the owl.

 

 

Monica Rico is a Mexican American CantoMundo Fellow, Macondista, and Hopwood Graduate Poetry Award winner who grew up in Saginaw, Michigan. She holds an MFA from the University of Michigan’s HZWP and works for the Bear River Writers’ Conference. Her manuscript PINION is the winner of the 2021 Four Way Books Levis Prize in Poetry selected by Kaveh Akbar.

Website: monicaricopoet.com
Twitter: @monicaricopoet
Instagram: @monicaricopoet

 

 

 

Witness blends the features of a literary and an issue-oriented magazine to highlight the role of the modern writer as witness to his or her times. Launched in Detroit in 1987, the magazine is best known for showcasing work that defines its historical moment; special issues have focused on political oppression, religion, the natural world, crime, aging, civil rights, love, ethnic America, and exile. The issues “New Nature Writing,” “The Sixties,” “Sports in America,” and “The Best of Witness, 1987 – 2004” eventually appeared as university press anthologies. In 2007, Witness moved to Black Mountain Institute at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. The magazine publishes one print issue and one online issue a year, and increasingly seeks out work that contextualizes the American experience by highlighting issues of global concern.

Spring 2023

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Editor-in-chief Jarret Keene & Emily Setina

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