1983
By Poetry Issue 103
That first morning, I remember
clinging to a table’s edge—
both legs jackhammering the white
linoleum floor tiles—praying for
my benzodiazepine to finally,
finally kick in.
Strategies for Dealing with Impermanence
By Poetry Issue 103
The boy inside me is watching, frowning.
But something else is watching him,
saying, sweetheart, saying, it is so hard.
Read MoreICU, Four a.m.
By Poetry Issue 102
In the dark, everyone is kind.
Read MoreExodus
By Poetry Issue 92
It takes a lifetime’s blindness to see one’s father. —Cid Corman My father mumbled forth his violated commandments for half my life. I inscribed them on incense and holy water and when I drank them they tasted like cigarette ashes in a coca-cola can. There were no tablets save the pills he didn’t take.…
Read MoreUnless a Kernel of Wheat Falls
By Essay Issue 87
I. EVERY FACE IN THE NEONATAL intensive care unit looked apologetic and scared, like old, lonely men do on their deathbeds. A nurse told my wife Georgie how lonely she had been ever since her husband died. An intern cried alone in the far corner of the room and sent her condolences later via email. One…
Read MoreWaiting with Cynthia
By Poetry Issue 87
While my brother and I waited for our father to die, which took longer than we thought it would, one of the hospital’s chaplains came in to visit us. Her name was Cynthia, and the first thing she did was read some passages from The Book of Common Prayer as we stood around our father—…
Read MoreThe Bodies of Birds
By Short Story Issue 87
THE LIGHT OF LATE AFTERNOON touching everything—my hands, my face, the wings of birds—illuminating edges of clouds—the kitchen a bottle of light, pale green filling with sound—the woman playing piano in a room down the hall—everything clean until the boy, the girl, the husband come home—I’m on my knees in the light scrubbing the floor—my…
Read MoreFacts about the Moon
By Essay Issue 55
Why Believe in God? Over the past few years, the Image staff contemplated assembling a symposium based on this simple problem. But we hesitated. Should we pose such a disarmingly straightforward question to artists and writers, who tend to shun the explicit and the rational? Or were we hesitating because the question itself made us…
Read MoreNote to My Sister from Notre Dame
By Poetry Issue 66
It didn’t help that the boys are Jewish, and the stone angels only clumsy halfway- hoverers, not as smart as electrons, quarks, or strings that turn like dazed rubber bands in a breeze. It didn’t help that we’d walked all over Paris first. Still, the rose window entered them: a complication, a shattering of light.…
Read MoreThe Kind that Heals
By Short Story Issue 68
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…
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