The Art Student
By Short Story Issue 66
MRS. WALLER WAS seventy-one years old and she kept her invalid husband in cigarettes and beer by posing for the figure-drawing class at the academy. Her first name was Inez, but neither the instructor nor the students ever called her anything but Mrs. Waller. Darrell Horn, honorably discharged from Uncle Sam’s navy, had no idea…
Read MoreThe Reading Wars
By Essay Issue 67
IT’S 103 DEGREES in Lincoln, Nebraska, and my mother is sitting at the kitchen table, twisting the elastic steel band of my father’s big watch around her wrist. She is paging through a book as massive as the New York telephone directory. It contains all of Shakespeare’s plays. The letters are the size of midges,…
Read MoreGoodbye
By Poetry Issue 66
Each day I woke as it started to get dark, and the pain came. Month after month of this—who knows when I got well. With dawn, now, waking from the rampage of sleep, I am walking in the Lincoln woods. A single bird is loudly singing. And I walk here as I always have, as…
Read MoreThe Age of Loss
By Poetry Issue 69
You have come to a time when everything is loss— your parents dead, your friends dying or gone south. You have come to a time when you have money and nothing you care to do with it, though you take cruises, spoil the grandkids, redecorate the house, which, schooled in irony, echoes as if abandoned.…
Read MoreAfter Love
By Poetry Issue 71
Our opened mouths close, but the soft boundary of our bodies remains porous for a while longer. An exchange keeps going on between the darker afternoon light inside and the brighter light outside. The day is loosening its hold. Birds flash across the windows, unidentified. We are still not back from wherever it is we…
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 MoreYou Who Seek Grace from a Distracted God
By Poetry Issue 82
You, who seek grace from a distracted God, you, who parse the rhetoric of empire, who know in your guts what it is but don’t know what to call it, you, good son of a race of shadows— your great fortune is to have a job, never ate government cheese, federal peanut butter— you, jerked…
Read MoreAugustine’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective Writers
By Essay Issue 82
The following is adapted from a commencement address given at the Seattle Pacific University MFA in creative writing graduation in Santa Fe on August 9, 2014. IN THE RAPIDLY CHANGING, cutthroat literary marketplace—where it’s easy to get published but harder to make any money or sustain a career—my usual commencement address, based as it…
Read MoreI Am Poured Out Like Water
By Poetry Issue 81
I chanted Lord’s river during Matins. The psalmist had written Lord’s forever. My mistake, of course, but I like my version better. Christ’s body of skinny, flowing, noisy water reminds me of the creek behind our house in Virginia. I felt him, playing as a boy in the woods. My brothers and I built forts, caught crawdads under…
Read MoreIdeal Marriage
By Short Story Issue 81
THROUGH A WARMING NIGHT the ice dams on the Big Slough thawed, and in the morning the first robins, antic in their hunt for worms, hopped in the south yard. Freddie Cahill’s spirit, dormant through what had seemed the longest winter of the eighty-some she’d spent on earth, stirred once again to meet the season’s…
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