Faith, Hope, Charity
By Essay Issue 55
AMMA IS COMING to live in Richmond,” Mom announced one night at the dinner table. Elizabeth and I looked at each other quickly. Which of us would have to give up her bedroom? Immediately I began constructing an argument in my mind, listing the reasons why Elizabeth’s room would be more suitable for Amma—it was farther…
Read MoreThe Nature of a Marriage
By Book Review Issue 57
The Maytrees by Annie Dillard (HarperCollins, 2007) A NEW BOOK by Annie Dillard comes with extraordinarily high expectations. We expect her observations to make us sit up and notice the natural world—and our part in it—with new eyes. We expect to focus small in order to think large. We expect her lyricism to impress, her language…
Read MoreThe Fawn
By Poetry Issue 57
1. The vigil and the vigilance of love. Sitter to three towheaded, rowdy boys, the spoiled offspring of the local doctor, our cousin Maren came north for a summer and brought us stories of the arid south— cowpokes and stone survivals. ————————————-One afternoon she summoned two of us to the garage, a leaning shed with…
Read MoreAdam Praises Eve
By Poetry Issue 57
She is so beautiful, it is enough— her skin like milk, nipples like cherries, her hair a long night without stars. I find irresistible the blue vein pulsing above her left ankle, the green of those intelligent eyes. Everything she wants, I want, and though my mind is cleaved, my full heart can only rejoice.…
Read MoreUnderwhelmed
By Poetry Issue 59
Under the catastrophic dark, the comet splintering the sky with its ancient grief, under the splay-handed palms, under drinks glowering dark in globes of glass, under the tender humidity, the phosphorescent surf, under the calls of nightjars chuckling up from the ground, under the ticking aloe under the moon’s absence, under, under, under. Under the…
Read MoreThe Priest Stops in the Churchyard
By Poetry Issue 60
after Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory It is not quite peace, this breathing rain, for peace requires human company. I have only tattered cuffs and wisps of thread in my pocket for each soul I could not save. I first mistook the whitewashed brick for barracks, but now, while the rain heaves in…
Read MoreApocalypse Love
By Poetry Issue 65
Love at its start and at its finish is not a sentiment ————–but in your arrival a restless fury, eye of cyclones, the dream of a fossilized gaze smashed under amber arrangement of stars in the air and on your face— each step a last judgment. Sentiments change, but not the struggle between the life…
Read MoreFour Poems
By Poetry Issue 66
Knowing life grinds us, And dust Is what we’ll become. Sensing, likewise, That the moral Of our story Has to do With being mortal. Yet love grounds us. And the beloved Grows in us: We are her slow cocoon. And the poem is a door; The song, a little window. § Bowed by a ceaseless…
Read MoreThis Orange That
By Poetry Issue 68
Santa Cruz Island A white cotton shirt like my wife’s Loose over her Shoulders I’m thinking just Brushing Her breasts But Provençal or Basque this Woman or Italian perhaps Not blonde not Dutch but her skin like Skin like the peel Of skin next the bulb of a tulip The scent Of her the scent…
Read MoreCaritas
By Poetry Issue 71
Hiking in Switzerland with a bad back and doctor’s orders not to fall, through meadows of bluebells and buttercups, daisies and tiny orchids of pale lavender, tiger-striped mossy rocks, forget-me-nots, even the thistles tender in their bristly buds. But danger lurks in beauty of the shining rock slippery with summer melt when here the trail…
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