Tag: tc Wiggins

ONE ART’s 2025 Best Spiritual Literature Nominations

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ONE ART’s 2025 Best Spiritual Literature Nominations

tc Wiggins – Like Lightning  

Moudi Sbeity – All Things Bloom  

James Diaz – I will not go to Darkness having known Nothing of the Light

Naila Francis – For my friend weeping at the coffee shop  

James Feichthaler – So Much Baggage  

Gary Fincke – The Far North

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The annual Best Spiritual Literature awards are hosted by Orison Books.

“Orison Books publishes Best Spiritual Literature (formerly The Orison Anthology) every year, a collection of the best spiritual writing in all genres published in periodicals in the preceding year. […] Editors of literary periodicals (print or digital) may nominate work in a single genre or in multiple genres to be considered for inclusion in our annual anthology, Best Spiritual Literature, which will reprint the finest spiritually engaged writing from a broad and inclusive range of perspectives.”

Like Lightning by tc Wiggins

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Like Lightning

If the myths are to be believed
there is no delight which lasts.
The beautiful grow old then die.
Children experience snow
for the first time, once, then never again.
Passion itself can only take us so far.
It guides us through the fields
of indulgence to abandon us
inside a constellation lit valley
beneath the crimson-throated chortle
of cuckoo. Leaves us there
repeating why, why, why, like a
rich-man-turned-beggar, hunched
off to the side of the pavement
as pedestrians pass or step around him.
Few loves become like the Moon.
Most become like lightning. Or,
if we’re lucky, like the clamoring of
excited hens. Wild, and echoing
for hours and hours through the thundering
night. Then echoing even after that.

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tc Wiggins is an African American poet residing in Cincinnati, Ohio who has been writing since the August of 2022. His favorite writers and inspirations are Jack Gilbert, Linda Gregg, Mary Oliver, Maggie Smith, Victoria Chang and Wendy Cope. tc suffers from chronic (if not terminal) boredom. You should send him poems to read, preferably your own. His Instagram handle is scaringthemuse.

Three Poems by tc Wiggins

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Failure

Light lifts from the lake at dawn
then leaves his face by dusk.
The waterfall is both chorus
of song and silence.
Some days I am like Elijah
ascending on horses into heaven.
Other days are different, so different.

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Likely Gone

It is yet another afternoon in January.
Convincing again an almost lover to love
herself while reading the book of Job.

Currently he’s in the thick of the whole ordeal.
Of losing everything. Children, servants, sheep—
his wife cooking in the dim silence of the kitchen.

Outside the snow stretches west for miles.
Or would, if houses were not propped up
like tombstones for the living. Suddenly I

can’t help but recall the burrow of bunnies
we years ago had found in our backyard
filled to the brim with marble-eyed babies

shivering inside their patches of brown-white fur.
Outside the snow stretches west for miles. Many
of them are likely gone now. Likely long gone.

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Morning Sex

How do our knees not buckle
beneath the immense weight

of their own body? What
force does the horse see

that compels her, even from birth,
to keep running away from herself

always? My god. Was the equation
wrong this whole time? Do swans

sing of love before death
or is it the song

which kills them? I fear madly
for the ouroboros. Has he

ever been taught how
to not swallow himself

whole? It is early morning
when pleasure leaves me

and a woman nearly out of love
asks if I am

still doing okay. And I say yes,
yes dear. I am still doing okay.

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tc Wiggins is an African American poet residing in Cincinnati, Ohio who has been writing since the August of 2022. His poems have appeared in Red Noise Collective, Every Writer, Small World City, Big Windows Review, Door is a Jar, and Diode.

Two Poems by tc Wiggins

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I knew our love had faded

when the patch of land you picked for our picnic
was littered with insects—crawling and buzzing—
knowing my fear. But all was still pleasant then.
We sat under the long oak tree splitting in two
overlooking the lake and the loading dock
that settled into that silent view of everything.
Nothing had moved or mattered for some time.
Not the water clouding, the children, the skipping
of their stones. Not the geese or fish swimming gently
in their separate countries. Occasionally, we chatted
in our short phrases and held the other’s hand
like a stranger’s under the dimming sun.
Then a silence once more. It came and buried us
for many minutes and I believe it was then
we knew. At some point,
for some reason, I had asked you something
stupid, but true, at least true to me, along the lines of
Why do think that we—as people throughout history—
stake so much of our importance on our dead things?
and you, looking to the shallows of the lake, had said
nothing, but laughed
in a soft routine.

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From the Bench Meant for Two, I Sat and Watched

as the four ducks—siblings, I presumed—
waddled through the whole length of
the public park. In their synchronous step.
Each head turning when one turned;
each resting when one paused to rest.
Them quacking and rocking and marching
until they had vanished into bush
as if it were air. I do not understand
my own division from life. Or
how even the feathered know family.
What I do know is of this silent
weight—of always watching, of always
writing. Of never walking with.

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tc Wiggins is an African American poet residing in Cincinnati, Ohio who has been writing since the August of 2022. His poems have appeared in Red Noise Collective, Every Writer, Small World City, Big Windows Review, Door is a Jar, and Diode.