Most Glorious
by Faith Scott
Ara Osterweil, Good as Rocks, acrylic on canvas, 64 × 72 inches, 2025. Courtesy of the artist.
Most glorious
Faith Scott | APR 2026 | Issue 51
We decay and become our most glorious
Reclaiming our place in the sanctuary of we
No one tells you this upon arrival
First memory cares nothing of fossils and seeds
Apart from wishing and imprinting
Legacy begins at the beginning
We decay and become our most glorious
Reclaiming our place in the sanctuary of we
We are never complete
Even rot is purposeful, corrosive, beautiful
Collective divinity inescapable
choreographed decomposition
sediment and song, symbiotic
Your existence is profound and ever-changing
So too are your death and repose
We decay and become our most glorious
Reclaiming our place in the sanctuary of we
Allow the fire to overtake you
Cleansing and clearing away
Charring black chrysalis
Sarcophagus constriction
Exquisite tension building to crack
Ooze of relief
Seeping free
Oxygen opening
Ready or not
We decay and become our most glorious
Reclaiming our place in the sanctuary of we
not fair or pure or foretold
but duplicitous, corrupt, and devious
the instinct to expedite the cycle
ruinous to the possibility contained
within this erotic decomposition
elusive when driven by our own desire
abundant when liberated
as all can be
Faith Scott is a poet, writer, TEDx speaker, therapist, yogi, and awkward-brave-ish-leaper living just outside Kansas City. She lives with her husband, daughter, 2 dogs, and 2 cats. She travels often and loves connecting with others on art, social justice, and healing. She has been in recovery since January 2022.
Ara Osterweil is a painter who works in the traditions of staining and gestural abstraction. Much of her inspiration comes from natural phenomena, such as landscape and weather. Though many of her images come from impressions of her travels to the desolate landscapes of New Mexico, Nova Scotia, Scotland, and Iceland, many more come from her impressions of destinations still unvisited. Filtered through the caprice of the imagination, storms, deluges, mountains, and lakes appear and disappear in the shifting terrain of apparitional landscapes.
In addition to being a painter, Ara Osterweil is also a writer and scholar of postwar art and cinema. Her writings on contemporary art, experimental film, and world cinema have been published in magazines and journals such as Artforum, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Camera Obscura, Framework, Film Quarterly, Little Joe, and Millennium Film Journal, as well as in the anthologies Porn Studies, Women’s Experimental Cinema, Body Worlds, and Taking Place. Her book Flesh Cinema: The Corporeal Turn in American Avant-Garde Film was published by Manchester University Press in 2014. Although she originally hails from Brooklyn, Ara is currently based in Montreal, where she is an Associate Professor of World Cinema and Cultural Studies at McGill University.