Panic Attack on the Morning of My Eighty-Third Non-birthday
By Poetry Issue 120
Death sitting bored there, yawning. All that jive.
Read MoreThose Beloved Ghosts of Compiano
By Poetry Issue 109
Like you, I’m on a journey, though where I’m going / changes with each moment.
Read MoreThey Too Go Round
By Poetry Issue 101
Look as upward they gaze: those blessèd, dancing round and around in that circle of praise.
Read MoreIn the Realm of Kings and Queens
By Poetry Issue 101
And there’s my mother, trembling for the safety of her kids, saying something at the looming man, trying to reason where there’s no room for reason.
Read MoreA Conversation with Ron Hansen
By Interview Issue 57
Ron Hansen’s novels are Desperadoes, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (both from Knopf), Mariette in Ecstasy, Atticus, Hitler’s Niece, and Isn’t It Romantic? (all from HarperCollins). Atticus was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award. Hansen is also the author of the story collection Nebraska…
Read MoreElegy for William Carlos Williams on the Eve of His 125th Birthday
By Poetry Issue 64
A chic Italian restaurant here on Rutherford’s Park Avenue. On the corner across the street: your home, sold to strangers. All those bright flowers you & Flossie tended to in your backyard gone. A piece of still-warm bread & a bottle of Chianti I had to bring myself. It’s a dry town still, where the…
Read MorePutting Out into the Deep from Gloucester
By Poetry Issue 73
The sea wind whispers and the tall oaks shake, their leaves shimmering in the August noon. And now the dry grass wrinkles and the floorboards flame. Saffron motes, a distant bird cry, this brackish sea. What was it you figured the wind might say? The oaks sway gently this way and that. Like young girls…
Read MoreBeautifully Dogged
By Essay Issue 80
The Road Behind Us Image’s Founding Generation When Image was founded in 1989, the cultural landscape looked different than it does today. Religious writers and artists felt cold-shouldered in the public square and often ill at ease within the church. The need for a journal that demonstrated the continuing vitality of contemporary art informed by…
Read MoreThe Open Window
By Poetry Issue 83
In Pierre Bonnard’s The Open Window the artist looks outward from his modest living room. It is summer, the heat baking the orange on the grill-like wall. To the right, a woman is resting in a chair, escaping as she can the sizzling midday air in which even her quizzical black cat blurs in the…
Read MorePsalm for the Lost
By Poetry Issue 83
Down the dark way, the dark way down. Everything dark now, as he has come to see: that the way was always dark, the journey dark, the mind dark, the answers like the questions dark, each day dark, the glaucous pearl white eyes, even when the sun spread across the greengold grass, glistening the bright…
Read More