Twenty-Five Years of Fresh Air
By Poetry Issue 91
With no walls or ceiling to block it, the breeze shuffled my hair. I was chained, but to a comfortable chair on a single, electric boxcar that rolled through the world at thirty-five miles an hour. IVs kept me fed and watered and a catheter kept me clean. My jumpsuit, white at sentencing, splotched in…
Read MoreThe Icon
By Poetry Issue 54
The face of the Madonna with child makes a dark mirror of what you are to feel: the temporary but desperate way a part of you is wounded until the hurt becomes a lens. Inside you is a city the mosaic spells out with tiny precious stones across the ceiling and the walls, beginning with…
Read MoreThe Revolt Against Narcissus
By Essay Issue 54
IN A SCENE from book 4 of Milton’s Paradise Lost, Adam and Eve talk one evening of the glories of Eden and their unmerited free creation by God, unaware that they are being watched by Satan. This little scene takes place shortly after Satan’s shape-shifting arrival in Eden and serves as a kind of foreshadowing…
Read MoreThe Reflection
By Poetry Issue 71
An unexpected reflection of myself in a passing window glances this way then after a quick double-take recognizes me. Like me, she’s caught by surprise; no time for the split second preparations that tend to precede looking in a mirror, or to hide the disappointment in her eyes, her sense that had we met incognito…
Read More