by Sarah Wetzel

Please St. Anthony, whether he’s dead
or alive, whatever the outcome, please, let them
find him by nightfall, said a weeping woman

on Fox evening news. Only five minutes later, my father
rang to tell me she was his best friend’s daughter
whose three–year–old son had wandered

into the Louisiana swamps where they still lived. It didn’t sound
like her, my father said, but it was her face,
her name. St. Anthony, the patron of lost things

and missing people. For days, hundreds of men
and women, helicopters, dozens of dogs and horses scoured
the wild, watery terrain near Bayou Teche. When two found

a sneaker near a small pond, they called in divers.
After three days, I told my father, the boy is dead. But that night,
a man armed only with a Bible and his best dog

spotted him asleep in the brush. God led me
straight to him, he told the cameras. When I asked about miracles,
my father once said, they are a path leading

out the grimmest war. Raised Catholic, my father
still remembers when the parish priest saw the Eucharist
become real human flesh. The next day, WWII ended.

In today’s paper, as well as the Louisiana miracle,
someone else’s child died in a fire; another unlucky boy
was accidentally shot in a drive–by. Reading over my shoulder,

the man next to me on the train to work said he’d once watched
a dead man come back to life. You should have seen
the doctor’s face. The look in his eyes, when he opened them.

by Sarah Wetzel

The rain leaves fingerprints in
last summer’s dust
of the window,

while just off shore, anchored
and waiting,
the barge that will ferry the lucky.

In one version of my story,
I sell my hair
and the good skin of my stomach.

In one version, I carry you
from the burning car
and this time you don’t die.

The sea with the rubber hose of a river
down its throat
is swallowing as fast as it can.

If you watch long enough, you’ll see that rain
shapes the path in the pane
for the rain
that falls behind it —

yet if you put a hand
to the glass,
the water will fall toward you.

Our lives are always half over.
There’s still time.

by Angela Patten

I see you on the concrete streets
of East Liverpool, Ohio
that industrial Crockery City where you were born.
Your red hair like the berries of a Mountain Ash
setting fire to a gray morning.

Oh Jane, fires are burning
in the Little Bear, New Mexico
in Skull Creek, Wyoming
all over your beloved Montana.

Wind–driven, unpredictable
charring acres in an hour
they obscure the sun at midday
sometimes jump containment lines
leave burn scars on the land pink as singed flesh —
the indelible mark of a sacrament
that obliterates the past.

Oh Jane, your body was up for anything
before sickness started running through you
like a wildfire. Some people escaped
left you to shift for yourself.

Now firefighters have learned to get out of the way
allow those conflagrations to do their disinfecting work.
Eradicate thick canopies, brushy undergrowth.
Permit sunlight to reach the forest floor.

Maybe the rains will come soon.
Maybe a miracle will happen.
Maybe you can just let it burn.

by Angela Patten

Just before The Great Disappointment
when the Elect could still believe
they had been singled out for salvation

Just before the trees began flinging themselves
into blossom, serving up dollops
of raspberry sherbet, and peppermint stick
with clotted cream

and you walked around gawking upwards
at each delectable concoction,
tasting possibility on the breeze.

Just before you could remember
being still too young to imagine
what it felt like to be old.

You were riding the upswing of the seesaw,
thrust up so high and wild
you forgot about lever and fulcrum,
the ripening and the falling–off.

Just before the month your mother said
was all for you. A gift so lovely
it would take you all your life
to take it in.