Category Archives: Poetry

40 Celebrities That You Didn’t Know Were Atheists

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By Ricky Garni

Beneath the article is a photograph of Sean Penn.

I haven’t read the article. I am not certain I want to know who is an atheist among celebrities or even my friends. I think that if someone knew whether or not there was a God, I wouldn’t ask him. I would be happy to know of course, if there were. Perhaps I would like someone to just surprise me with the news. They could say: “Guess what?”

But I still wonder about the photograph of Sean Penn. He doesn’t look very happy. Then again, he never looks very happy. Perhaps he is an atheist and it weighs heavily on his soul. Perhaps they asked him if he was an atheist and he found it upsetting, because he loves Baby Jesus very much and he also gets upset easily anyway even when he can’t find a parking space or a sharpened Number 2 pencil. Perhaps that was the only photograph they could find of a celebrity that looked like an atheist and frankly he kind of does. Or perhaps Sean Penn is an atheist, plain and simple. And perhaps the photographer just surprised him with good news, that there really is a God, a really great one, and he can’t be an atheist anymore. Who wants to know that they’ve been wrong their whole life? It’s really upsetting. And embarrassing. I wish the photographer had surprised me instead. I would be happy. And I never hit anybody. Except for Charlie when I was about 6 and anyway he just stole my double decker Corgi bus and so it was sort of his fault.

Winter View

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By Yuan Changming


Like billions of dark butterflies
Beating their wings
Against nightmares, rather
Like myriads of
Spirited coal-flakes
Spread from the sky
Of another world
A heavy black snow
Falls, falling, fallen
Down towards the horizon
Of my mind, where a little crow
White as a lost patch
Of autumn fog
Is trying to fly, flapping
From bough to bough

Dangling Participles

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By Donal Mahoney

Every time something breaks
like the pipe in the wall
we heard gushing

this morning
my wife wants to call
a repairman because

I can’t fix anything
except split infinitives
and dangling participles

and I usually agree
but this time
I mention the kayaks

in the attic and say
why don’t we hop
in the kayaks

open the front door
and sail down the street
wave to the neighbors

cutting their grass
planting their peonies
worrying about crime

and shout best of luck
we’re tired of the good life
we’re sailing away.

Bergmanesque Yahrzeit*

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By Gerard Sarnat

Grandson Simon buries borrowed keys in his toy chest
to get one of my damselfly daughters’ attention,
but she’s glued to the tube’s Sunday news shows
then the beginning of one of Woody’s homages
to Ingmar’s Wild Strawberries story
about old age’s battle between integrity and despair.
Middle son finds them, straps both nephews
and Grams into their car seats …
My wife tiptoes to the bedside with a bowl
of blackberries she bled for picking
from the backyard’s thorny vines,
then whispers, “Dear, it’s about time …”
Don’t say with sadness that Dad is no more,
say with gratitude that he was and is ever-present,
which consoling mantra Mom’s hearing aids can’t
as she lurches from her wheelchair
while Ell’s stroller careens toward Poppa’s coffin —
a collage of fetal-formed faces as I die?
Lying down, smelling the grass and counting insects,
pissed by the whirring of neighboring graves’
plastic smiley-faced rainbow windmills,
fire ants brushed off; my grandkids take turns
spinning the emoji doohickeys before converging
on the ground to gather me in.
The 6-year-old says, “Coach, I know we can’t bring him
back to life, but maybe we make Great-grandpa feel better.”

*Anniversary of the death of a Jewish parent, sibling, child, or spouse.