In the Unwalled City
By Essay Issue 109
Memories—so many people say, “You’ll always have your memories.” But even though my son died almost three years ago, memories of him are almost entirely painful. They are not Wordsworthian “recollections in tranquility,” but sharp stabbing pains that arise out of nowhere.
Read MorePsalm [On the fifth day the epidural fell from my back]
By Poetry Issue 109
a dream that repeated: to find the good / you must uproot the pain
Read MoreJudge Not
By Poetry Issue 106
The Girl God
By Poetry Issue 106
The night of my most pain
a new girl came and was put
in the opposite bed.
On Ronald
By Essay Issue 105
I have hurt my father two times that I know of.
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 MoreSister Saint Maisie Connecticut
By Short Story Issue 86
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…
Read MoreAnswers from the Whirlwind
By Poetry Issue 59
Has birth ever peeled you apart Has birth ever hollowed you out For I have seen a woman being transfigured Into lips her water breaking like the first Ocean spilling between the thighs of creation And then between those lips her firstborn crowning Like a tongue that dips to test the light and scalds Have…
Read MoreA Prayer
By Poetry Issue 59
like a slap, like a bone, like a spice, like a thought gone still in the light, another kind of sorrow, a kind of life, a cheek stroked, then freckled. Its rhythm amounts to injury, to a small space. No singing. Just a sack of air, a soiled shirt, more sermonizing that picks away at…
Read MoreThe Sparrow
By Short Story Issue 60
SHE’D BEEN Flying a Cessna, shooting practice take-offs and landings with a flight instructor at an Omaha airstrip that was just a windsock and one lane of unnumbered concrete runway veined with tar repairs. Richard Nixon was president, the month was September, the temperature was sixty degrees, and she was Karen Manion, mother of two.…
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