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Doorways to Death

By Christiana PetersonAugust 20, 2018

My house has doors built for death. When my husband and I first bought it a year ago, I won’t say I fell in love with it, but it felt like a place that could become a home. Built in the 1850s, the house has narrow stairways that appear in unexpected places and steps that…

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Between Death and Resurrection

By Christiana PetersonMay 24, 2018

And should you glimpse my wandering form out on the borderline Between death and resurrection and the council of the pines Do not worry for my comfort, do not sorrow for me so All your diamond tears will rise up and adorn the sky beside me when I go —“When I go,” lyrics by Dave…

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Saint Death and Easter

By Chris HokeMarch 29, 2018

I got a call from a number I didn’t recognize. The voice was low, lifeless. He just got out of jail, and the guys in there told him to call me. I function as a volunteer chaplain in Washington State’s Skagit County Jail, and I’m the closest thing to a pastor most gang members in…

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In Praise of Albuquerque

By Morgan MeisMarch 8, 2018

The sun was high in the sky. Midday, late July. The light was washed out. The black of the asphalt was washed out, not even gray anymore, not even a color. Albuquerque is divided between the people who, at midday, go elsewhere and the people who don’t go elsewhere. As I said it was midday,…

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Poetry Friday: “The Preacher Addresses the Seminarians”

By Christian WimanFebruary 23, 2018

I once met a beer-guzzling goat like the one in Wiman’s poem. His name was Clay Henry, and he was elected the honorary mayor of Lajitas, Texas in 1986. But my deeper resonance with “The Preacher Addresses the Seminarians” lies in my identity as a seminary dropout who backdoored his way into the preaching life.…

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Poetry Friday: “Graveyard Prayer”

By Robert CordingJanuary 26, 2018

Robert Cording’s prose poem reminds me of my late Aunt Mary, who, at roughly the same age as the poem’s narrator, chose her gravesite for the sightlines it offered—in her case, a clear view of the horizon where the sun rises and where, she believed, Jesus would return on Resurrection Day. She visited regularly, each…

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The Shore after the Storm

By Christine DiPasquale SchellerJanuary 24, 2018

The sun rises over the ocean where I live, two miles from the Atlantic. You can watch it set over the bay too if you’re lucky enough, at sundown, to be on the thin barrier island that separates the mainland from the sea. The water here in the mid-Atlantic region isn’t the spectacular aqua, teal,…

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Remembering Father George

By Caroline LangstonNovember 14, 2017

My priest has died. Or rather, in Eastern Orthodox terminology, he has reposed. He has fallen asleep. It’s funny how this death both echoes, and completes, the death of my biological father forty years ago. Throughout my childhood, for years after my father died, nothing irked me like people’s vague references to somebody “passing away.”…

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Poetry Friday: “Cellar Door”

By Marjorie StelmachSeptember 22, 2017

I love poems that stitch together memories from opposite ends of a lifetime, connecting them to our collective story in surprising ways. This poem feels dreamlike in its skill at just this kind of stitchwork. How simple Stelmach makes it look: take a phrase from poetry (commonly, arbitrarily) held as the most beautiful, and test…

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My Tears Had Names

By Jessica Eddings-RoeserAugust 30, 2017

  The phone rang. My newborn must have been asleep—I have no recollection of her at that moment—but my two preschoolers were with me, and I realized later that I had repeated the horrific news aloud. Thus, for months, my kids sat together at their play table to reenact the conversation. “What do you mean,…

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