Note 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…
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…
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