Articles

Sudden summer rain, warm on your back _____like asperges slashes, more of a blessing than anything to get dolloped in the eye and laugh away _____the shame of believing in any kind of redemptive wash to get to the glass door before the stroup of sky _____spills, to be the chaplain carrying in the far…

It is hard to be misunderstood. And how many of us get vindication after a century or so? I mistook the little bloodsucker for a wad of gauze as it whirled from the sailor’s spliced thumb. It became an iridescent helix, a liquid amber’s leaf dangling through a day-long spring and fall and spring, Have…

New Orleans, August 29, 2009 One last Katrina poem, the final praise for what I hated. I quit. No more a guard dog of damaged goods chained in the yard, drinking from tadpole puddles, dragging my doom and gloom down happy streets. I swear. No more damaged goods, watchdog groups, or Katrina’s white flags on…

They say statues wept when she passed—gypsy girl in the choir who spoke in tongues. I thought she was faking, but prayed, just in case, that I would never babble, or, during the peace, slump over and writhe. I hid behind my knotted hair to plot her exposé. Her and her clan of women, smoke…

BABE O’LEARY IS GOING up to the ballpark and it’s probably going to kill her. Well, there are worse ways to die. Getting downstairs is slow torment, one step at a time so the kneecaps won’t scream. She shifts her weight as if it’s a sack of laundry. Before she deals with the subway steps…

En el Nombre del Padre   ON THE NIGHT of our grandfather Papa Tavo’s death, Tío Gonzalo was watching the midnight replay of that week’s Lucha Libre, the only kind of wrestling he would watch. Like she did on so many other Saturday nights, our Tía Victoria had gone to bed early because even though…

The following is adapted from a commencement address given for the Seattle Pacific University master of fine arts in creative writing on August 6, 2011.   I’D LIKE TO SHARE a few thoughts with you that I hope are appropriate for the occasion, words derived from two texts we’ve studied together, T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets…

Our opened mouths close, but the soft boundary of our bodies remains porous for a while longer. An exchange keeps going on between the darker afternoon light inside and the brighter light outside. The day is loosening its hold. Birds flash across the windows, unidentified. We are still not back from wherever it is we…

I have often been afraid to think of Augustine thinking, his mind a field, he confesses, that must be worked with much cost and sweat, and he the farmer laboring. Just knowing how little one can know is enough for most, but not Augustine— whatever crept around in his mind had no right to privacy.…

Betsy Sholl’s poem “The Harrowing” is published in Image issue 73. This web-exclusive interview with Sholl features questions from readers of Image.    How do you connect with secular readers? Part of me wonders if, when it comes to art, these distinctions between secular and sacred really apply. A poet has to write from a point…