Poem of the Week | March 02, 2026

“On Paradox” by Mallory Rodenberg is our Poem of the Week.

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On Paradox

A beast is anything without a choice.
A heart is a beast within the body.
When I was a child and trying to imagine God,
I’d picture Unsolved Mysteries host Robert Stack
stepping out of the shadows in his trench coat to insist,
“Perhaps you can help solve this mystery.”
I decided to stop believing in God the summer I started to drink.
This was the summer I worked at the airport,
making the planes stop, their noses to mine,
by forming an X above my head with reflective wands.
At the time I thought this evidence of personally ordained power,
but really it was just minimum wage.
Just. An adjective that can validate or belittle its noun.
Here is a joke I thought up in a fit of sobriety:
God is not the glove, but the glove box
in which I used to shove
all the things that might get me arrested.
Here is a joke I realized years after it happened:
the night I found my brother dead from a gunshot wound,
I’d been in a musical called And the Winner Is . . .
I played a 1960s beauty queen from outer space.
This means the most devastating thing to ever happen to me
happened to me in blue eye shadow and my hair in a beehive.
It was the first time in my life I thought I could really use a drink.
In the parking lot after a meeting,
Randy says he can see the wind pushing through me
because I have not yet made a fortress of my soul.
I believe him, if only for the VFW hat that says
he has seen some shit which is incomparable to the shit I’ve seen.
I want to say something back, to explain how hard it is
to think any of this is a blessing.
My long-ago acceptance of a for-nothingness,
trading in hope for the promise of whether you like it or not.
No just death, just . . . anyway. Maybe it’s time
to think again of the mystery solving I once believed
God offered me. Maybe not solving but embodying.
Maybe not embodying but laughing.
Laughing at the mystery.
The stupid beast pounding its wants against my chest.
Once, to make sense of things, I tried to read Simone Weil.
I didn’t understand any of it.
Only the part about misers.
How it’s not the misers but the saints
with a void where a heart might be.

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Author’s Note

Like a lot of poets, and a lot of people who find themselves in need of recovery, I’ve spent my life struggling with the why of the world. No matter how much I read or how much I experience, revelation has always felt just beyond my grasp. The mystery of it seems to be as impenetrable as death, and still, I can’t stop seeking answers. In 2024, I took a poetry workshop with Ben Fama and Chariot Wish. We read Simone Weil’s Gravity and Grace and wrote poems in response. There was so much of Weil I didn’t understand, but her lifelong struggle to articulate the why of things—that, I understood. This poem came to me during that time.