The We of Me: Varieties of Kinship in American Nonfiction
By Book Review Issue 81
Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography by Richard Rodriguez (Viking, 2013) White Girls by Hilton Als (McSweeney’s, 2013) Men We Reaped by Jesmyn Ward (Bloomsbury, 2013) THE DUSK OF A SUMMER EVENING in London’s Hyde Park, years ago. Richard Rodriguez, a Mexican-American, is misidentified by a woman he’s passing on the street. She smiles. “Arabie?” The author…
Read MoreI Am Poured Out Like Water
By Poetry Issue 81
I chanted Lord’s river during Matins. The psalmist had written Lord’s forever. My mistake, of course, but I like my version better. Christ’s body of skinny, flowing, noisy water reminds me of the creek behind our house in Virginia. I felt him, playing as a boy in the woods. My brothers and I built forts, caught crawdads under…
Read MorePrayer
By Poetry Issue 81
Bathrooms are the best locale. All that waste and water and getting clean. Or trains. The nearly equal passengers. A phone rings in the kitchen but no one picks it up. Milk goes bad at room temp. You don’t check your email anymore. Could only scrawl a message: “I____you with all my harm.” Each day…
Read MoreSometimes I Am Permitted
By Poetry Issue 81
for Connor Stratman How winter keeps us warm now: the anesthetic snow sifting from its anesthetic sky. A man hocks spit in the alley for each day’s white on white, but we both live on the red line, we are both still waiting on this train. Because my sins are those of digression, or…
Read MoreIdeal Marriage
By Short Story Issue 81
THROUGH A WARMING NIGHT the ice dams on the Big Slough thawed, and in the morning the first robins, antic in their hunt for worms, hopped in the south yard. Freddie Cahill’s spirit, dormant through what had seemed the longest winter of the eighty-some she’d spent on earth, stirred once again to meet the season’s…
Read MoreLa Cicada Familia
By Poetry Issue 81
Like an old Victrola, its needle stuck In the groove where the flamenco dancer Patters her firecracker feet to the floor, Machine gun maracas, so the cicada Pays homage to its clattery muse, She who pitied the flight of Tithonus Withering eternally through his dog days, So the myth tells us,…
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 MoreYou Couldn’t Believe as I Did
By Poetry Issue 84
What became of the nice pagan girl I married? you complained one morning after I’d found my way to the church down the street and kept walking back every Sabbath. Over dinner you’d quiz me on the sermon, argue with the absent preacher, and me if I defended his BS. Maybe you resented any other…
Read MoreA Conversation with Bruce Cockburn
By Interview Issue 84
Canadian singer/songwriter and human rights activist Bruce Cockburn has released twenty-eight albums over the course of a career that now spans more than four decades. His early music was contemplative, broadly spiritual, and grounded in nature, with a folk sensibility, and though he converted to Christianity in 1974, he never fit the Christian music industry…
Read MoreIn the Clear
By Short Story Issue 84
THEY STOPPED BINDING YOU a while ago, probably because they think you won’t try anything, that you’re too far gone now. You think they’re right. The only time they still use the blindfold is when they do their thing, when they make shallow cuts in your chest and upper arms and thighs, their laughter razor…
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