Skip to content

Log Out

×

Happiness

By Katherine Soniat Poetry

That evening she painted her nails metallic rose, placed the opal on her finger, and walked down the block to a party in the moss garden. A friend held her hand, getting involved with the milky luminescence of the ring. Before long he was telling her how his uncle loved to float down the river…

Read More

Radiance

By Katherine Soniat Poetry

Bernadette walked from the kitchen singing “Hold On,” that song with a rising refrain. Her voice strong, she looked at each of us in turn: the woman with a bullet lodged in her head, one with a daughter dead a year, another whose unexplained anger flew loose daily. And me, the visitor trying to come…

Read More

The Look of Love

By Anne Pierson Wiese Poetry

When I board the Manhattan-bound A train in Brooklyn, it is already crowded with commuters on their way home, faces bearing traces of the day—the downward lines of weariness, mostly, the sour pinch of frustration, sometimes the surprise of a smile or the clear signs of content: cheeks at peace, eyes that gaze with interest…

Read More

Some Saint

By Anne Pierson Wiese Poetry

There’s a church where I sit on my lunch hour when the silence within me cries out for its counterbalance without—the only sounds the clinks and clanks of old radiators working in winter and birds nesting up in the buttresses in spring, the mediated mumble of traffic and the echoing feet of those who come…

Read More

Once

By Kathleen Wakefield Poetry

The river heaved our boat on its back. I loved how the narrowness of my life opened into that prairie of waves, big sky. One evening we saw the sun’s last rays lift an island from the water; rock and pines floated mid-air, unreachable mirage hanging like a painting of Saint John on Patmos dreaming…

Read More

Aphorisms

By Theodore Worozbyt Poetry

In wisdom hunger lies. On black days, dress in black. Autumn is the echo of Winter. The name of the river’s curve is Leander. Take your cup from the tulip tree, your plate from the size of a spider. Rejoice! There is no choice in matter. If you would arrive, first leave. That is how…

Read More

The Wasp on Kierkegaard

By Katy Didden Poetry

If you expect the open air and find instead your feet fast in the dust so that you slip at great speeds down a hard sky, then love it. Rebalance on your three left feet. Extend your right three tenderly, tapping one black tip at a time. And the glass is good, as is your…

Read More

The Wasp on Weddings

By Katy Didden Poetry

Wasp, genus hymenopterae Hymenaeus, the god of weddings These days we gods are diminished things, black winged. I float like the infinitesimal hesitation, the unheard breath after I: “I wasp will.” “I wasp do.” I am the sadness shadowing the speeches of fathers: “Now she’s wasp elegant, wasp a woman.” I’m the one hovering over…

Read More

The Wasp on Renaissance Painters

By Katy Didden Poetry

after Caravaggio Everyone loves figs. Imagine the Virgin imagining figs Paint the girl in your studio modeling Mary as she stares past your shoulder at a plate of sliced figs. Imagine the cherubs imagining figs. Imagine green, Capucine yellow, imagine mercurial vermilion in the black background of a body, see my oiled wing as the…

Read More

Hens and Chicks

By Julia Spicher Kasdorf Poetry

After I decided the spectacular sewer pipes planted with hens and chicks were too tacky to keep, I started to love those succulent single moms, also called common houseleek and long ago planted on thatched roofs to protect homes from lightning bolts. Stone rose, sacred to Jupiter in the south, Thor in the north, emblem…

Read More

Receive ImageUpdate, our free weekly newsletter featuring the best from Image and the world of arts & faith

* indicates required