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Tania Runyan

Tania Runyan is an NEA fellow and author of five poetry collections, along with the memoir Making Peace with Paradise.

Poetry

Jesus Feeds the Birds

And it’s not always pretty. Those lilies clothed in Solomon’s splendor splotch with the leftover tufts...
Poetry

Sonnet for myself at 17

To the one I love, who played violin and twirled your hair with gracious angst: You pried clean off your grip on sin to sing with far and wide and deep. And lost....
Poetry

The Spirit searches everything

Endless darknesses of deep space and sea Verify something super holy’s going on Even when your lost-in-the-middle life Needs a shot of sanctity....
Poetry

Ephesus

I was in love with God for one afternoon.Twenty, alone on a beach, I dropped rocksby the edge and watched the ocean washgray into blue, brown into red. An hour...
Poetry

The great throne

Rabbi, I’m losing you in all these robes,like a kid tunneling through a department store rack,pummeled by grown-up fabric.The rainbow anchors its feet like a guard....
Poetry

There was silence in heaven for half an hour

The full inhalationbefore the coming of the kingdom.Pencils scuttling over legal pads,hands whispering in beards.Friend, I know the sound...
Books

Gold, by Barbara Crooker

Barbara Crooker enters the shades and brush strokes of daily life with such reverence that readers want to take notice, live better, and die better.
Poetry

We cannot take anything out of this world

One of the few ways I can speak to youis sliding nylon hairs over wound aluminum,...
Poetry

May the word run swiftly

Like the invisible coyotes that streak through the woodsto the fringes of our town, a bawling wind of voices.They’ve come too close, the village complains....
Poetry

Put on the new self

Twenty-five years after Praying the Prayer, when my new life was supposed to snap in place like elastic, the smell of crisp, store-rack cotton...

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Poetry

Ananias of Damascus

Saul, you thug who once dragged believers through the streets, flinging them from their beds so hard their arms popped from their sockets,...
Poetry

Count it all as loss

All of it: children whistling ryegrass, my husband rubbing my back in his sleep. Consider rubbish the sun climbing the eye of Delicate Arch,...
Poetry

Not by sight

The Jakartans offer themselves fully to the tracks,a row of living crucifixes stretched across the rails....
Poetry

Man is without excuse

Perhaps you could say that in Rome, Paul, where the olive trees of the Seven Hills strung their pearls of rain against the sky. And yes, as I hike Glacier Park...
Poetry

Areopagus

There is no waking without him.The creases in your sheets remind youhis job is to mess with your life. He stalks youinto the kitchen where the coffee splashes your hand...
Poetry

No one can boast

On the tollway just south of Kenoshaspring sets the boarded-up porn store ablaze,topaz dousing the peeling paint,the harp-notes of ice on the gutters....

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