New Monasticism, Old Homesickness: New Poetry in Review
By Book Review Issue 91
Earth Science by Sarah Green (421 Atlanta Press, 2016) Everyone at This Party Has Two Names by Brad Aaron Modlin ——(Southeast Missouri State University Press, 2016) The End of Pink by Kathryn Buernberger (BOA Editions, 2016) I WAS STARTING A THIRD UNIVERSITY DEGREE related to poetry when I first began hearing the expression “life of…
Read MoreRumspringa
By Poetry Issue 76
At secret slumber parties, Ruth and Ruby burst out of back rooms transformed. Their own version of ascension: loosed hair fanning pubic bones, shrieking louder than the rest of us. No bonnet, no beckoning church. Strong legs in borrowed Levi’s, our lipsticks strewn through sleeping bags. § From stolen stacks of their brothers’ outdated films…
Read MoreTuesday: Rhubarb, Lattice Crust
By Poetry Issue 76
Three things you can’t control: life, death, and children. Lord knows, you’ve tried. Good God knows, there’s holy risk just beyond the farm lane’s bend. And the paper and the radio shout of doom-oh-doom-oh. Yet you can force certain things to taste as you expected; you can bake brave resolution into rhubarb, its stiff pink…
Read MoreMonday: Peach
By Poetry Issue 76
Once, there was a path from springhouse to kitchen’s side entrance splitting the hill. Once, there was a sudden almost- funeral: daughter gasping in the water trough, pushed in by older brother now turned senator. Farmers once retrieved dippers for clear gulps between harvest and the afternoon milking, the springhouse door fashioned to resist an…
Read MoreSunday: Day of Rest
By Poetry Issue 76
(Twenty-four crusts to be frozen) Rise when sky’s amber. As coffee pot fusses, sift dry ingredients, butter the size of an egg. Measure out the needed doses. Have a passing thought about those years you weren’t allowed in this farmhouse kitchen without permission, how your new mother- in-law clucked each time flour clouded to the…
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 MoreSaint Francis Appears at the Scene of an Accident, Then Joins the Murmuration
By Poetry Issue 84
Black. Muscle. Stars. Wind. The horse was nearly torn in half. Black. Pulse. Strange. Light. The car’s right side was twisted open. Black. Crust. Oil. Shine. Imagine the night, the boy, the stallion, all of them closing in, loose for the first time in months. The car’s pointed hood, the horse’s neck, a low winter…
Read More