Easter Pantoum
By Poetry Issue 73
for the Twelve-foot Tall Dancing Icons of Saint Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church in San Francisco, California In a church in a city on the edge of the world The risen Christ dances Over the heads of the congregants Who are also dancing The risen Christ dances With all the saints—certified or surprised Who are…
Read MoreTopographies of Easter
By Poetry Issue 73
We are walking in the mild midwinter Snow and thin ice, up Coldwater Creek, Its many tributaries, their steep ravines Tracing the blue and brown lines that wind Dizzily over the unfolded whiteness of our new Map like staves for the crazy earth song we’ve been Sight-reading with our feet; we are singing the impossible…
Read MoreMagdalen
By Poetry Issue 73
But Mary stood weeping outside the tomb…. —John 20 She came to take care of the body. Some are like that. They feel the need to touch and handle _____where life was. We call it seeking closure. We call it clinging. We call it having difficulty facing reality; the reality that life itself _____has left…
Read MoreStep
By Short Story Issue 73
GWEN LIVED IN LOS ANGELES and her brother Dan lived in Chicago. They sent each other spoof news reports, fake X-ray glasses, envelopes full of plastic ants. After the horrible-smelling flowers were delivered to her at work—“What is that, road kill?” asked her friend—Gwen gleefully bought a pound of chocolates, stuck her thumb through the bottom…
Read MoreThe Weight of Fire
By Short Story Issue 73
A Narrative of Howling Wolf, 1875–78 Fort Marion Prisoner, Saint Augustine, Florida THE WAVES KEPT COMING like the cavalry. We stood on the wall of the fort and stared at the water. We rocked back and forth with the waves. We were prisoners of the Plains Indian Wars. We were stultified. We were sick.…
Read MoreThe Cave and the Cathedral
By Essay Issue 73
IN 1994, THREE SPELUNKERS were looking for undiscovered caves in the Ardèche region of southeastern France. The region is named after the Ardèche River, which has cut through limestone for millennia and created hundreds of caves. On a summer weekend expedition they came across a place in a cliff wall where they sensed a draft…
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