More on: family

Like one nation divided, the older—by three minutes—bragged: We had a race, and I won. The younger would respond: We had a fight. I kicked him out. Impossible to tell them apart— in photos, in home movies— hairy and smooth in equal measures, matching clothes, thin bodies, freckled, blue eyes behind black-framed glasses— as babies,…

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,…

The current issue of Image features three new poems by Scott Cairns. The author of numerous volumes of poetry, a convert to Orthodox Christianity, and a longtime contributor to Image, Scott has often advocated what he calls a “sacramental poetics”—the idea that a poem should not so much describe something as dosomething.   Image: Your poems use an exacting, prophetic voice, but…

MY FIRST CONVERSION took place when I was five years old on a heaven-reaching swing in my cousin’s back yard. It was a bright summer day and we had just returned from vacation Bible school at the Baptist church. Red cherry Kool-Aid stained our lips. Kristy was giving me an underdog—and I was swinging high enough…

In the moment my father died, we did not want to spend Another dollar for the twenty-four hours He would no longer be living In the Willow Haven full-care facility. We lobbied the nurses to credit the last moment He breathed among us. It was four-thirty am, April 26, 2007. Who in their right mind…

Inherited but Never Inhabited Story and the Garden   MY GRANDMOTHER MARY ALICE kept her big, tissue-paged Bible beside her party-line telephone and flipped through it, reading here and there, as she listened in on the stories being told along the Edmond Road. Even now, many of my kin keep Bibles by them the way…

ON MY BROTHER DECLAN’S third day on life support—the morning he becomes newsworthy—strangers begin to leave messages on the home phone. A funeral director leaves his number. An alarm-system salesman warns of the characters who scour the Globe and the Herald for stories like Declan’s, for tragedies that strike families from well-off towns, leaving their…

From The Parables of Mary Magdalene It is like a child asleep outside in her basket, shaded from late afternoon sun, veiled against evening flies, under her parents’ loving watch. Night is coming down, silently, like a worm on its strand of silk. The wind picks up. Let me feed her before we go inside,…

YOU SAY YOU’D LIKE a story for the ages, but you should know we live a little outside of time out here. Out here is the Nebraska panhandle, leveled as immaculately by wind and the spin of the planet as if it’d been planed by a master carpenter. As if the raw materials of the…

from The Book of Brothers 1. In the book of brothers, only one is chosen, only he walks with father, servants trailing them, to a place that will be known when it is known, only he is given to ask of father, when they arrive, the offering, where is it? (And where, while this defining…