Nonliteral Illustration
By Visual Art Issue 114
Robert Katz assembles found materials into tableaux inspired by stories from the Torah.
Read MoreTonight, I Travel Back to Allston Street
By Poetry Issue 102
I love you. That human line of language, three syllables and eight letters with two spaces in between.
Read MoreSudden Death
By Poetry Issue 60
I I am looking for the letter that arrived after Uncle Sol’s death. The one that says: The war is over! Love to Kayla, X-O-X. I even searched back through the cardboard box, opening each envelope in precise reverse order— sorry for the lapse between this missive and the last— watching their lives drawing closer…
Read MoreAnother Holocaust Poem
By Poetry Issue 60
I I watch them enter, lined up, ark-like, two by two, chatting quietly, and after the teacher, counting, passes, one pushes and the one pushed begins the chase. This is how the orphans marched through Warsaw in 1942, I tell the behaved ones, orderly and under orders, and I’m just about to start that terrible…
Read MoreI Used to Light Candles for You
By Poetry Issue 60
for E.J.K. I used to light candles for you (after your death had been catalogued in the secret book) in every cathedral I passed, most in small public squares. Cold stone, incense, the tall silence, the hush and seal of the door at the threshold. Though not a Catholic, I made the sign of the…
Read MoreWe Shall Not All Sleep
By Poetry Issue 62
Behold, I shew you a mystery; we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed. —I Corinthians 15:51 After the smell of lilies filled the tiny country church; after we drove down valleys and across mountains through winter rain and fog and dissipating snow; after the funeral director took our coats and intoned…
Read MoreThis Is My Body
By Essay Issue 64
I HAVE A BLACK AND WHITE photograph taken in 1967 that I found among my grandmother’s things after she died. In the foreground, my grandmother sits on a blanket, smiling self-consciously for the camera. To her left my brother stands in a seven-year-old boy’s macho pose with hands on hips, his smooth, hairless chest thrust…
Read MoreSome Saint
By Poetry Issue 67
There’s a church where I sit on my lunch hour when the silence within me cries out for its counterbalance without—the only sounds the clinks and clanks of old radiators working in winter and birds nesting up in the buttresses in spring, the mediated mumble of traffic and the echoing feet of those who come…
Read MoreWith Saint Christopher at Chimayo
By Essay Issue 77
I WANTED TO LIGHT her a candle at the holy sanctuary at Chimayo. I chose a Saint Christopher candle: she had just died. Melinda may have died at forty-nine of a heart attack, though there was nothing wrong with her heart. Or she might have died by choking, following a week of seizures. Or it…
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