Issue 95

Content warning: this story includes a depiction of sexual violence. SALIM PEERS THROUGH the peephole in the men’s room in Temple B’nai Moshe and sees two girls standing side by side at the row of sinks in the ladies’ bathroom. One is tall and slim with golden hair that cups her scalp like a swim…

IN LATE OCTOBER I started painting the trim around the outside of the windows white. I finished the east and south sides of the house and moved my ladder to the west. The red leaves were falling from the sugar maple and the buckeyes from the buckeye tree, and the squirrels were making their strangely…

Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved by Beauty: An Intimate Portrait of My Grandmother, Kate Hennessy (Scribner, 2017) My Utmost: A Devotional Memoir, Macy Halford (Knopf, 2017) Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions, Valeria Luiselli. (Coffee House Press, 2017) ACTIVISTS, ARTISTS, RELIGIOUS FOLKS—those of us trying to love our neighbor…

GROWING UP AS I DID amidst the dazzling lights of New York City, it is strange that even as a small child I was madly in love with the stars. The city’s glare effectively canceled out the night sky, admitting only the rare glimpse of the brightest heavenly orbs. Beyond the moon and Venus, you’d…

Under this skylight many lost things are visible. I see the mighty black and yellow spiders in the iris beds by the old garage and feel not a shred of fear. I could husk two dozen sticky ears of sweet corn and pick two quarts of strawberries on my achy knees without whining once. I…

1. When my unemployed faith reappeared as boredom, it seemed a diplomatic triumph. But just about then animals began to intercept me in my wanderings. I grew more and more susceptible to their solicitations. Trees are probably fearless, but the forest should have known better than to show off like that. We had long known…

On the road before sunrise, so none of us were citing Homer, Keats, or Dickinson during the drive to catch my flight. Only after I’d asked did Sean and Jens mention the anaconda they had found once in Sean’s cattle pasture. From time to time someone spotted the height of egret whiteness crossing daybreak’s blaze…

—————–after a painting by John Henry Twachtman Like a gate to Paradise, illumined as how fluttering angels might appear, the meadow seems misty while at the same time impossibly bright. But there looks to be hardly any way into such purity of color, through the many layers of lavender and yellow. And yet a few…

——1 Samuel 3:1   1. these days it seems one can only know ——-what God is not & ——-not what God is fully as though fullness is printed ——-plainly in plain sight & written in the body these days it seems the price for the divine ——-is one we cannot pay ——-though we never could…

1. Triune God, inhabiting the deep of us, Reassembling the broken chaneys of the mind, The wide and empty spaces Our earth orbits in have their own solidity; And your laughter swells across The undulating bubbles of the void.   2. Master of the waves that hold the stars, The loops enfolding all there is,…