Reconciliation
By Photo Essay Issue 104
As a queer woman raised Catholic, I have had a complex relationship to the church—making these photographs was part confession, part reconciliation.
Read MorePerfume Poured Out
By Essay Issue 89
One of the real tests of writers is how well they write about smells. If they can’t describe the scent of sanctity in a church, can you trust them to describe the suburbs of the heart? _____________________________________ ___________ —Diane Ackerman For your love is more delightful than wine. Pleasing is the fragrance of your perfumes;…
Read MoreBent Body, Lamb
By Essay Issue 88
Really, though, I’m struggling. Is it absurd to adhere to a religion whose most central rituals my body won’t even let me perform? What am I to make of all the parables in the New Testament where Jesus heals the crippled and the lame? And, most importantly, if I believe we’ll all eventually be resurrected back into the world, then is this body—this bruised, broken, wreck of a form—the one I’m stuck with for all time?
Read MoreHe Weeps among the Clare Antiquities
By Poetry Issue 69
At Poulnabrone Dolmen Argyle poured his soul’s ache into the hole of sorrows, huddling under the ancient capstone against the cold and crueler elements. Stone portal, stone cairn, stone everywhere— the rocky desert of the Burren bore a semblance to his own hard-weathered heart made barren by years of cast aspersions, pox, maledictions, cursed loneliness…
Read MoreIrenology
By Poetry Issue 78
For the word is living and active …………—Hebrews 4:12 Irene, a girl’s name. Irenology. Studies in peace. How does peace circulate? Open in Ezra and paging to Nehemiah, ——–I contemplate exiles rebuilding temple walls. I thought, is this a form of peace studies? Confess our sins. Our inability to perform ——-a divinely ordained task by…
Read MoreLa Pulchra Nota
By Short Story Issue 78
Do not love the world or the things in the world…. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world. And the world passes away, and the lust of it;…
Read MoreConfession: Quaker Meeting
By Poetry Issue 81
From my car I watched with dread the woman who had raged at the meeting, condemned us all, heading toward the car I’d nicked on the way in. My daughter hiding in the back, “I’m scared” coming from the balled-up shape of her. Trembling a bit myself, I got out of my car as the…
Read MoreThe Preacher Addresses the Seminarians
By Poetry Issue 81
I tell you it’s a bitch existence some Sundays and it’s no good pretending you don’t have to pretend, don’t have to hitch up those gluefutured nags Hope and Help and whip the sorry chariot of yourself toward whatever hell your heaven is on days like these. I tell you it takes some hunger heaven…
Read MoreCross of Nails
By Poetry Issue 84
The morning after the blitzkrieg that toppled the vaults of Saint Michael’s Cathedral and set the rest on fire, a stonemason found among the embers one roof beam laid across another, a kind of crucifix created by the forces of accident and violence and then by grace of eyes that saw in them an order.…
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