For the Virgin of Sorrows
By Poetry Issue 69
Remember a time before the big, important occasions that made it into the book, before the winemaking and the raising from the dead. Remember you were a girl, and a boy brought you flowers. The moon moved and another boy brought you flowers. It looked like that was the way it was going to be…
Read MoreA Spade is Not a Spade: The Art of Fabian Debora and the Mystery of Los Angeles
By Essay Issue 71
THE SPADE, ACCORDING to artist and former East Los Angeles gang member Fabian “Spade” Debora, is the craftiest card in the deck, the card that “takes all. The spade is a subtle and powerful symbol.” From that childhood insight, gleaned growing up in one of Los Angeles’s most violent public housing projects, came the graffiti…
Read MoreBlessed Are Those Who Yearn
By Book Review Issue 78
Blessed Are Those Who Yearn New Poetry in Review The Glacier’s Wake by Katy Didden (Pleiades Press, 2013) God Loves You by Kathryn Maris (Seren Books UK, 2013) Incarnadine by Mary Szybist (Graywolf Press, 2013) AT THE END of Paradiso, Dante, after confessing his inability to describe the vision of Love he sees, nonetheless…
Read MoreCyprian Variations
By Poetry Issue 79
A. The heart is a divided city Between two alphabets. Church bells, minarets Betoken Time has stopped where it is broken. Nothing forgets. This is called history, not pity, It is not spoken. B. To remember is to cross Through no-man’s land Into an imaginary country You do not recognize But where the streets are…
Read MoreMore Strange
By Poetry Issue 80
than the angel who eclipsed your ordinary life to see his reflection in the dark of your eyes. More strange than when god thumped in your belly and tugged at your breast, hungry for earth, for what he had made. Strange to hear the command to take and eat of his body just as he…
Read MoreByzantine Gold
By Poetry Issue 80
A chain of blue-white chips mimics waves pleating around Christ’s body. On the western wall, another scene of owl-eyed saints drawing light unlike us. Despite centuries of votive smoke, the shining ranks of prophets gesture, elegant as sommeliers, toward mosaic scrolls and would have you consider the honeycombed geometry of paradise—dome, arch, and column— it’s…
Read MoreChristmas Morning in a Hotel Room
By Poetry Issue 85
Out the window, the parking lot and beyond that, the highway. No doubt something important began or ended precisely there, or there, in that spot where the ice-white rental car is idling neatly, clouds of exhaust billowing up like hope, like the hope of the Christ child, silent in his mother’s arms, finally silent after…
Read MoreAnnunciation
By Poetry Issue 83
What matters is what occurs occurs Between them, not to them. It’s only that The angel doesn’t matter, nor the virgin. A blade of light scissors the air Between them. To them it’s only that: A glancing blow, or a kind of cleaving, A blade of light. Scissor the air Wide open, then it happens:…
Read MoreVenetian Villanelle
By Poetry Issue 83
She is a mother first—in every church she lights a candle for her harrowed son. One already lit supplies the match. Today San Stefano, above her stretched a heaven of dark keel vaulting. Here an icon, Byzantine, true presence in the church of the second Eve, the mother she beseeches. She gives a euro to…
Read MoreThe Vermilion Saint
By Short Story Issue 83
Santa Rosalía de Mulegé Baja California 1820 THE COCHIMÍ SAY THE VIRGIN guards her pearls, and for that reason the church is never locked. The stone mission of Mulegé, perched upon red hills above the reach of estuarial floodwaters, had no doors to lock. The Indian workmen had not finished the carving. The church doorway…
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