The Look of Love
By Poetry Issue 67
When I board the Manhattan-bound A train in Brooklyn, it is already crowded with commuters on their way home, faces bearing traces of the day—the downward lines of weariness, mostly, the sour pinch of frustration, sometimes the surprise of a smile or the clear signs of content: cheeks at peace, eyes that gaze with interest…
Read MoreThe Ordinary Time
By Poetry Issue 68
Goldfish in the horse trough nibble at morning’s surface. They are not busy; they are breathing. The sparrow threading straw under the eaves lifts whips of time to his mate’s music. This is the opposite of business. Birds, even singing, can be the architects of our silence. Would you be healed by being? Then be…
Read MoreThe Kind that Heals
By Short Story Issue 68
ON MY BROTHER DECLAN’S third day on life support—the morning he becomes newsworthy—strangers begin to leave messages on the home phone. A funeral director leaves his number. An alarm-system salesman warns of the characters who scour the Globe and the Herald for stories like Declan’s, for tragedies that strike families from well-off towns, leaving their…
Read MoreThree Roses
By Poetry Issue 79
Where only my scar line remains, a red rose blooms. Luscious, full, so open that if it dropped a single petal, it would not be as lovely as it is this very moment. My eyes watch through the rose’s flaming center, crimson, as if through a hundred desiring eyes— till the world prisms: quartz pink,…
Read MoreThe Rule of Life
By Essay Issue 82
Dorothy Day’s Rule of Life: See the face of Christ in the poor. And: journal every day. 1. THE FIRST TIME I saw the buildings, they buzzed. In my evangelical fever I didn’t know if it was electricity, demons, or just the sounds of thousands of souls put in close proximity together. This is where…
Read MorePoverty
By Poetry Issue 82
So much sitting still these past months, hoarding my sorrows, looking out at another day’s news- paper being buried by the accumulating snow. I could be waking from a half-remembered dream that, no matter how I try, I’m unable to put together, my daily sighs a kind of catch-all for the poverty of everything I…
Read MoreEmerson Mourns the Death of His Son
By Poetry Issue 82
I have love And a child, A banjo And shadows. It was the light, always the light. First, that absent early hour when he woke to find the world made strange, knocked awry, as if creation had suddenly undone itself, the landscape dishonored by this loss. The dawn moved haltingly toward day. He would have…
Read MoreMoravia
By Short Story Issue 82
1. AUNT MORAVIA SAID that she had swallowed a glass piano. She was my father’s aunt, a stitch of an old woman. She’d come to live with us when I was seven and my brother Robbie fifteen. Mother had been bedfast for a month before the birth of my sister. In the meantime Aunt Moravia saw to…
Read MoreSaint Francis Considers His Own Advice after Finishing a Chaplaincy Shift at Mercy Memorial Hospital
By Poetry Issue 84
If you have no voice after reading Rumi to a dying man you hardly know, this is a good and timely thing. Pay attention. If you’ve sworn to stay at the hospital for two days, end up staying ten, you are the wind that rocks me forward. There are lights in the city…
Read MoreA Quick Interpretation of the Sixth Seal
By Poetry Issue 81
The sun turning to sackcloth means nothing to see here; all the sheeted corpses look the same. The moon surging with blood equals the deaths your butterfly wings effected while you slept. And the stars sizzling at your feet like Epsom salts are his way of saying you’ve lost your chances with time and space.…
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