Thoughts Without Order Concerning the Love of God
By Poetry Issue 68
The kingdom of my kitchen invites one snail to measure a carrot peel with the full length of her body. Of Christ and necessity this snail says nothing. The celery shines. By morning, my countertops, my floor will glisten with the star road of her meanderings. It measures a universe of dark and light in…
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 MoreSheet: A Psychology of Hatred
By Poetry Issue 68
for William Christenberry Some people have told me that this subject is not the proper concern of an artist or of art. On the contrary, I hold the position that there are times when an artist must examine and reveal such strange and secret brutality. It’s my expression and I stand by it. ——————————W.C. I.…
Read MoreNothing Happens: Everything Happens
By Essay Issue 68
THEY WILL ALL LEAVE, first my brother-in-law, who is frank about his tastes, and then the others, borne away on several tides of pretext—the bathroom, pots on the stove, the freshening of drinks—from which none return. Now it’s just me watching, lying belly down on the bed where I used to sleep with my wife.…
Read MoreAnother Idiot Psalm
By Poetry Issue 68
by these and countless other dear / impediments, I stoop to find / my knees
Read MoreAnother Idiot Psalm: We Say Flight
By Poetry Issue 68
We say flight of the imagination, but stand ankle-deep in silt. We say deep life of the mind, but seal the stone to keep the tomb untouched, O Stillness. Nearly all we find to say we speak for the most part unawares, what little bit we think to say unmoved, O Great Enormity Unmoved. Brief…
Read MoreLenten Complaint
By Poetry Issue 68
The breakfast was adequate, the fast itself sub-par. We gluttons, having modified our habits only somewhat within the looming Lenten dark, failed quite to shake our thick despair, an air that clamped the heart, made moot the prayer. Wipe your chin. I’m dying here in Omaha, amid the flat, surrounded by the beefy, land-locked generations,…
Read MoreEnds of the Earth
By Short Story Issue 68
JONQUIL EVANS TURNED off of the blacktop and drove toward the pines in the distance. Gravel sounded against her LeSabre. She drove gingerly, but on this afternoon in late November the makings of a holiday wreath meant more to her than her LeSabre’s fine finish. Her husband the judge was good to her. Sometimes it almost…
Read MoreReligious but Not Spiritual
By Essay Issue 68
FOR A NUMBER OF YEARS I’ve been saving up the fiction of Anthony Trollope as a sort of mid-life treat. At least I hoped it would be a treat. Trollope is the kind of author who is often ridiculed as a literary lightweight: a Victorian lacking the range and energy of Dickens; a drawing-room chronicler…
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