Proof, Matter, Stars
By Essay Issue 100
I know you don’t believe in God, which is only strange to me because you feel like proof.
Read MoreBurn
By Short Story Issue 100
Doesn’t a fire, good and hot, burn back into a wound until there’s nothing left for it to do but heal?
Read MoreYour Face Has Always Been Peppered with Moles
By Poetry Issue 96
for Granny For as long as I’ve witnessed the affliction of light washing over your skin like this, as you stand hunched over the pink lip of the sink, scrubbing, Sunday spilling through these small windows of time, lighting up the kitchen like some pancake-flipping ghost, your face has always been peppered with moles. Pray…
Read MoreThe Stand-In
By Short Story Issue 95
1 C AROLINE WAS PADDING, distracted and shoeless, through the weekday stillness of the empty church when she came upon Desmond’s wife standing on the other side of the back entrance. Framed by the double glass doors, Kim looked uncharacteristically small in an out-of-season winter jacket. Caroline offered up pastoral smile no. 6: Ironic Appreciation…
Read MoreLove Letters
By Essay Issue 93
Then it enters the upstairs room, to rest beside my grandmother, a Korean War widow who sold her home and bid farewell to clan and country, arriving in Arkansas to raise two children while their parents worked, who surrendered her strength in the last days of 1988 to a second stroke, but not before teaching me how to read a love letter.
Read MoreThree Colors: Blue
By Essay Issue 93
Krzysztof Kieślowski (1993) DO YOU FEEL ABLE TO TALK? is the first full line in Three Colors: Blue, Krzysztof Kieślowski’s masterpiece of a meditation on grief and liberation. “Were you conscious during the….” is the next. The doctor is unable to finish the question he poses to a woman who has just lost her husband…
Read MoreGlossolalia
By Poetry Issue 93
The Piano, Jane Campion (1993) May it be as it was in our rhapsodies. Tethered to you, oneiric assemblage of sea salt ivory: you playing me as I imagine the gods have, cavorting on their mountain of stone. Forgive me. This our default condition: each of us versions of the other’s own making. Call me…
Read MoreFat Tuesday
By Poetry Issue 92
Out of exceeding gloom and out of God, I break a prayer from a growl and sing a hymn more ordinary than tap water. I pray that I might be more than my skin, this dance of atoms, this ritual of ash, this tribe of twilight and rattled angels, this pattern of epiphanies rejected. I…
Read MoreDomestic
By Poetry Issue 92
The knife was held like night— quiet in her husband’s hand. In silence, the umbilicus was snipped. The moon went on shining. A mare leapt astride a stallion. Jerusalem was drowning. A match dropped. Hay fired. Kings slunk away. The world hung heavy on her breast. —Love’s foundling. A curtain twitched: unholy neighbors. A nosey…
Read MoreNeedle
By Poetry Issue 91
A lost man might pour his jug onto the sand to feel one with the desert, and for that moment he is cleansed of heat and thirst. But freedom is not a moment’s craft. Pinned by memory, he will regret the gesture and the surrender. The sullen break of journey onto knees will not console…
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