More on: nuns

WHEN CALEB WAS THREE YEARS OLD, he went to his cousin’s house. At the door he was met by a little girl holding two coins in one hand while pulling down her bottom lip with the other. She lived a few houses over and was visiting to show off the money she’d been given for…

was what our nuns called it, the bread of angels, the Lord’s supper on the eve of his pure and holy sacrifice, their black habits hovering over us like threats, always the rosary dangling from a curveless hip, always chalk dust swirled on the cracked blackboard, above which the patron saints sat awaiting our prayers…

Madeline DeFrees is the author of two chapbooks and eight full-length poetry collections, including Spectral Waves (Copper Canyon, 2006) and Blue Dusk (Copper Canyon, 2001), winner of the 2002 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and a Washington Book Award, as well as two books of nonfiction about convent life. She spent many years as a nun…

S HE WAS A BEAUTIFUL child and then a beautiful girl who seemed protected by an aura of goodness so that lascivious men kept their thoughts to themselves and didn’t lay a hand on her. But one afternoon her luck ran out during a hurricane which brushed New England in September of 1948. Her mother’s…