The Extra Child
By Fiction Issue 119
Twenty years ago, we brought the first child home. We held him, and the silence before us then was the deep, vast thrum of all we didn’t know. We were here, suddenly parents. The silence weighed down the air like boulders on silk. And then, of course, he cried.
Read MoreSelf-Portrait with a Stranger’s Baby
By Poetry Issue 111
Who would just leave a baby Jesus out / In their front lawn for anyone to take?
Read MoreMoth Light
By Fiction Issue 109
But it unfolded itself, and, like a long-held secret, its wings swelled wide enough to span her palm. Then she saw the color it had been keeping close: hind wings emblazoned with what shone like blue eyes, rimmed with gold and mounted on a concentric field of black.
Read MorePICU Pietà
By Poetry Issue 109
You are not here. / Just this precious, flawed body, briefly home / to your soul.
Read MoreStranger Fruit: American Pietàs
By Visual Art Issue 109
Jon Henry photographs Black mothers and sons across America.
Read MoreSeer Stone
By Poetry Issue 107
Two women, in separate instances, each blessed and healed a child in her care. Neither of these women had ever discussed the blessing with anyone before for fear it would be considered “inappropriate.” Another woman gathered her sister’s frail, cancer-ridden body in her arms and blessed her with one pain-free day.
Read MoreLocket
By Poetry Issue 106
You carry our son in a locket
you hang around your neck
each morning, a way, I guess,
of carrying what isn’t and what is
Quasset and Sprucedale
By Poetry Issue 106
In my mind,
my son cannot be nowhere, and yet I cannot imagine
where he is, except here, growing older inside me.”
Our Daughter Compared to the Air We Breathe
By Poetry Issue 106
You are two atomized
in one, our molecules
become wild air that whims
the world…
His Mother Reading
By Poetry Issue 103
Bible open. On her lap. Same page for years.
Her white hair. Spooky red ink. Deuteronomy.