Love Letters
By Essay Issue 93
Then it enters the upstairs room, to rest beside my grandmother, a Korean War widow who sold her home and bid farewell to clan and country, arriving in Arkansas to raise two children while their parents worked, who surrendered her strength in the last days of 1988 to a second stroke, but not before teaching me how to read a love letter.
Read MoreWar Metaphysics for a Sudanese Girl
By Poetry Issue 61
For Aciek Arok Deng I leave the camp, unable to breathe, me Freud girl, after her interior, she Lost Girl, after my purse, her face: dark as eggplant, her gaze: unpinnable, untraceable, floating, open, defying the gravity I was told keeps pain in place maybe trauma doesn’t harden, packed, tight as sediment at the bottom…
Read MoreScout’s Honor
By Poetry Issue 86
During the Oregon centennial celebration, my Boy Scout troop, dressed as cowboy cavalry, was brought to the dog track to rout a whole tribe of Cub Scouts dressed as Indians in a wild reenactment of a battle that had never occurred or had occurred a thousand times, depending on your degree of historical specificity. Firing…
Read MoreThe Fawn
By Poetry Issue 57
1. The vigil and the vigilance of love. Sitter to three towheaded, rowdy boys, the spoiled offspring of the local doctor, our cousin Maren came north for a summer and brought us stories of the arid south— cowpokes and stone survivals. ————————————-One afternoon she summoned two of us to the garage, a leaning shed with…
Read MoreThe Garden
By Short Story Issue 57
THE TASTE OF GRAPES was the taste south of his grandmother’s garage back home. Small as marbles, green and sour skinned—when you bit them, the skins spilt and squirted the globe of flesh into your mouth, smooth and soft; if there were any sweetness, this is where you would find it. He could not define…
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 MoreArs Poetica: Baptismal Story
By Poetry Issue 83
My father thought the Anglican liturgy pure poetry, once, Three hundred people chanting in the multi-colors of the chancel, Saying on cue We do! Though they might have answered Otherwise in their own living rooms, together They committed to many things, the dignity Of every human being, the baby lifted high above My father’s head,…
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