Pelagia, Holy Fool
By Short Story Issue 61
…we are made a spectacle unto the world, and to the angels, and to men. We are fools, for Christ’s sake. ————————————–—I Corinthians 4:9-10 Part the First: Spin, Beat, Spin LISTEN, wicked children! When une jeune slut-fille dirties her own halo, simple folk cast stones, and it takes the baroque and obstinate solemnity of…
Read MoreThe Look of Love
By Poetry Issue 67
When I board the Manhattan-bound A train in Brooklyn, it is already crowded with commuters on their way home, faces bearing traces of the day—the downward lines of weariness, mostly, the sour pinch of frustration, sometimes the surprise of a smile or the clear signs of content: cheeks at peace, eyes that gaze with interest…
Read MoreFishguard Harbour
By Poetry Issue 69
There is a moment prayer occurs to the conscious mind, or rather the absence of prayer in the moment of need hitherto. Experience names the vacuum it has been seized by, only the mouth— the physical fact of the mouth, sensuous, capable of beauty or deceit— can’t form the words the ventral thalamus is telegraphing.…
Read MoreWorld
By Poetry Issue 72
An old Jewish tradition, dating back to the Talmud, records that the world is sustained by the presence of at least thirty-six tzaddikim. These people do their good deeds quietly: their neighbors do not know who they are. If, however, that minimum of truly saintly people does not exist, then the world itself will perish.…
Read MoreYam Kinneret: The Harp Music
By Poetry Issue 76
It is March; in Ireland daffodils will be suffering the harshest winds; here the coach had turned back from the slopes of the Beatitudes towards Tiberias; to the right the valleys, green and flush, rising to the hills; to the left, the lake, quietened in an evening lull and pleasuring; I settled in my seat,…
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…
Read MoreAugustine’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective Writers
By Essay Issue 82
The following is adapted from a commencement address given at the Seattle Pacific University MFA in creative writing graduation in Santa Fe on August 9, 2014. IN THE RAPIDLY CHANGING, cutthroat literary marketplace—where it’s easy to get published but harder to make any money or sustain a career—my usual commencement address, based as it…
Read MoreIcon of an Unknown Saint
By Poetry Issue 84
Your eyes are a brocade of finches, feathered bronze and gold-flecked shards of stained glass, afloat in pails of morning’s milk. Your pupils are black as onyx, as distant stars moments beyond collapse. I enter through them to find, in a barn lit through rafters, the Son of Man with mud dripping from his hands.…
Read MoreSaint Francis Considers His Own Advice after Finishing a Chaplaincy Shift at Mercy Memorial Hospital
By Poetry Issue 84
If you have no voice after reading Rumi to a dying man you hardly know, this is a good and timely thing. Pay attention. If you’ve sworn to stay at the hospital for two days, end up staying ten, you are the wind that rocks me forward. There are lights in the city…
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…
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