Love 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 MoreAt Heaven’s Rim
By Poetry Issue 90
Like Abraham and Sarah at the Mamre oaks before the hard-earned good news, and like David and Bathsheba in the royal house with the tenderness of the first night, my sainted mother and father rise in the west over the sea with all the glows of God upon them— for all the weight of their…
Read MoreMy Mother’s Visit
By Poetry Issue 86
My mother was the first pianist I ever heard. All through childhood I was spellbound by her gift, her virtuosity. Now I welcome her to my house, show her the grand piano, and lift the lid to its full height and glory. I ask her to join me on the black bench. At ninety my…
Read MoreWhere Are You?
By Essay Issue 85
HOME, I SAY. I’m on the road, I say. I’m in class. No, it’s okay. What’s the matter? It was always the first question. Where I was would determine whether I could help. Where are you?—during those early months when I would pick up. He was locked out, he was stuck in the mud, etc.…
Read MorePoverty
By Poetry Issue 82
So much sitting still these past months, hoarding my sorrows, looking out at another day’s news- paper being buried by the accumulating snow. I could be waking from a half-remembered dream that, no matter how I try, I’m unable to put together, my daily sighs a kind of catch-all for the poverty of everything I…
Read MoreA Map of the Watershed
By Short Story Issue 81
THE SPELLS CAME late that summer and left him bewildered, muttering. He had known this was coming, had felt the tremors in his mind and seen familiar objects—his can of shoe polish and his TV remote—transformed in his hand into strange artifacts. The TV remote he found in his desk, facedown beside the calculator. The…
Read MoreThe Vermilion Saint
By Short Story Issue 83
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…
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