More on: loss

IT WAS AN ORDINARY autumn night in suburban Chicago when I received the most disturbing book I have ever read. I was seventeen, slouching in my bedroom making a half-hearted attempt at homework, my sweaty cross-country clothes festering on the floor. My father appeared at the doorway and handed me a yellowed paperback that looked…

A long time spent trying, kneeling, to light a votive for my mother from a votive for another. Each fire floats on shallow viscous water. With my stick, I wet wicks, extinguishing prayers instead of sending up mine: I loved you every day, will. My stick blackens, does not carry light. Evening bells ring. The…

In a room at the side of the hand-painted santuario, with its seven-foot cross found glowing one day in the red desert dust, a row of crutches left behind, and walls of photos of the children for whom we pray. Their baby shoes. Their army uniforms. Ourselves in them. Ordinary pains, unending in time as…

Hold the phone, it wasn’t an apple, apples have seeds and seed-bearers, check, perfectly fine in vegan Eden, nor does the story name the fruit, botanical paradox, fruit without seed, which even those grapes, supposedly seedless, have at some stage, albeit vestigial, and if the tree delighted her eyes, then Stevens was wrong, beauty in…

Many days into any kind of drought, whether lost faith or drying riverbed, god from machine seems the only way out. While the ospreys and quick kingfishers scout for their food in prayer, waiting to be led, many days into any kind of drought begins to weaken resolve and feed doubt, so that birds scoop…

What matters is what occurs occurs Between them, not to them. It’s only that The angel doesn’t matter, nor the virgin. A blade of light scissors the air Between them. To them it’s only that: A glancing blow, or a kind of cleaving, A blade of light. Scissor the air Wide open, then it happens:…

Santa Rosalía de Mulegé Baja California 1820 THE COCHIMÍ SAY THE VIRGIN guards her pearls, and for that reason the church is never locked. The stone mission of Mulegé, perched upon red hills above the reach of estuarial floodwaters, had no doors to lock. The Indian workmen had not finished the carving. The church doorway…