I’ve always wondered what it means to love “like a rock.” Does it mean that the love itself is rock-like: round? heavy? flecked with mica? Or that you love someone the way you love a rock? Or perhaps it means to love the way a rock would love…
Category: Holy Wild
Black & White & Red All Over: The Mysterious Power of Three Common Colors
"Red as blood, white as snow, black as a raven's wing…." These three colors appear again and again in folklore the world over, but why? What is it about this triad that exerts such power on our collective imaginations?
The Bodies Buried In The “American Heartland”
Responses to a recent tweet by Pete Buttigieg rightly called out the presidential candidate for his use of the phrase "American Heartland" as "code for white." The incident raises interesting linguistic questions about how we unpack complex cultural metaphors.
“Cowbird/Changeling”: New Column in SageWoman Magazine
What kind of bird are you? (And how do you know?) My penultimate column, "Cowbird/Changeling," is out now in the latest issue of SageWoman Magazine.
How To Think In Public
There's so much I want to tell you — but how?
Can Christians Be Animists?
Mark Wallace's new book, When God Was A Bird, represents a well-intentioned first step along the path towards Christian animism. Unfortunately, it is the same first step that Christians have been taking for hundreds of years. Can they do better? ...maybe.
Twice As Much Of Whatever We’ve Become
In light of the more serious challenges to free speech Twitter faces, and their inaction in rising to them effectively, bumping up the character limit from 140 to 280 seems largely irrelevant. What will we say in 280 characters that we haven't been able to say in 140?
Five New Poems: Evolving Gender and the Mask of Social Media
Masks are everywhere these days... and not just because Halloween is just around the corner. Sometimes we don't even realize the masks that we've been wearing -- the patterns and themes and synchronicities that have been lurking behind the mask of random chance in our lives -- until someone else points them out to us. That's sort of what happened to me when, by sheer coincidence (or was it?), a curiously thematic bunch of my poems all were accepted for publication during the month of October.
New Poems: Reclaiming the “Tweet” as Modern Haiku
I've been putting off writing a quick update post for you all, since I don't want to spam your news feeds and inboxes every time a new piece comes out... but at this point, the procrastination is getting a little bit silly! So for now, here are just a few of my latest poems (with more to come next week, so be sure to swing by and check those out, too!)...
New Poem: Abstracted
I can't tell you how honored I am to be included among a handful of amazing writers and artists in the most recent issue of Third Point Press, a literary journal that hails from my very own hometown of Lancaster, PA. (There's an extra special thrill in getting published somewhere that even your mom has heard of!) Check out my piece, "Abstracted."
Alison Leigh Lilly 