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Working: Vol. 5, No. 1 - Issue 17 Spring 2026

Augustine’s Unknowns​

Issue 17
Perhaps, said Augustine, time’s design is a spiraling
transcendence, a concept fierce and giddy in its
performative righteousness. Such thoughts made his brain
 
spin within the bones that braced his ponderous head:
Picture him standing, ashen, contemplating the bump
he knew would come to shatter the continuum.
 
His words rendered time and forgetfulness in dynamic layers
to explore metaphorically: like angels whose feathered breaths
would winnow insubstantial from substance, revealing
 
every angle of a prophecy in some Einsteinian block universe,
where the evangelical implodes beneath the sublime through 
an infinity of seconds, coexisting in the moment before oblivion.

S. L. Wallach appeared recently in Broad River Review, Black Herald Press, Ariel Chart, and Solstice and is forthcoming in The Main Street Rag. Her opera “Elijah's Violin” was performed in San Francisco several years ago. She has an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts.

Copyright © 2025 Empyrean Literary Magazine, L.L.C.
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