Jam Jars
By Poetry Issue 91
In classical physics, the past is assumed to exist as a definite series of events, but according to quantum physics…only as a spectrum of possibilities. —Stephen Hawking Too often they kept on surfacing suddenly, stifling…
Read MoreBirth/Rebirth
By Poetry Issue 68
Living in that wet belly was a long flight through driving rain, destination this thin river of a life made from petal, paper and some such flimsy stuff. Soul doesn’t need much to keep herself clean and combed, even if the body winds up a hobo or murderer, she knows how to make of herself…
Read MoreThe Invented Child
By Poetry Issue 71
I spring from the pages into your arms. Someone who once knew him said Walt Whitman sang before breakfast behind his bedroom door— broken arias, bits of patriotic tunes, the way my child sings this morning in early spring, the way the raucous mockingbirds fill the warming air with their own borrowed songs. The world…
Read MoreStill Alive, with Crows
By Poetry Issue 71
A merciless night here for the trees. At dawn: stripped bushes, ————————–strewn branches. Surveying the scatter for the unbroken, I come up with crows. It’s random on the face of it, this ruthlessness, ——————————————this rampage— like most of the world’s violence, much of its love. Still, after long safety, who can resist ———————————a good dies…
Read MoreSecond Line and the Art of Witness: Steve Prince’s Katrina Suite
By Essay Issue 78
Going through the experience of Hurricane Katrina taught me to submit to and praise God. The message I got is that we are hopeless, but we still thanked God in the midst of it. Some people can’t fathom how to sing and praise him in the midst of Katrina. That is where I pulled all…
Read MoreReturn to the Beginning
By Poetry Issue 85
The scrambled eggs, already fried and fragrant on a plate, slip back into their shells; each smooth white egg sails toward its vagrant mother chicken, roosts in a fertile cell. The melody beats back to eighth notes which settle, dark spots on the snowy staff of bass and treble clefs, then briefly float through Bach’s…
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