Kinds of Resistance
By Poetry Issue 76
The animal in us wants to leap up, leap out maybe, like the dog on its chain trying to bound higher and farther than the chain allows because the two boys in their kiddie pool are bounding, scooping up water in their hands and tossing it and jumping, as the woman beside the house on…
Read MoreThe Waltz of Descartes and Mohammed
By Poetry Issue 76
There is No God But God. I think Therefore I am. I am; There is Therefore No God. I think, “But God, But God….” I am, I…think. Is there No God Therefore? Therefore Good for No God Am I. There is, I think, “I.” Think There: For There is But God. I am No God,…
Read MoreThe Shadow-Cross
By Poetry Issue 76
I just couldn’t breathe in its shadow. It weighed what the cross weighed, that shadow Cross, more than any shadow should. No Sun could shoulder that kind of shadow, No man kneel there without a shudder. The dark beams crushed me flat as shadow, My flesh, grass, matted by the shade. No Way a mere…
Read MorePontius Pilate Fugue
By Poetry Issue 76
_____What is truth That truth-telling is like theft Under your odd, local laws? Your own kind call you scofflaw. In fact, they prefer a thief. We don’t nail your type in Rome; Preach, and we just stroll past you _____And your truth. _____What is truth Anyway but a king thief Talking his way past the…
Read MoreTo Jenya on First Noticing the Dog’s Bowl of My Imagination
By Poetry Issue 76
In all this wind I’m sure you’ll find something empty, an unsent package or the edge of a glass. Perhaps you’ll come back cradled, released to your barest parts. My emptiness loves yours. Can you hear it? As grace and distraction, our many selves bend in order to sing. You’d tell me the better to…
Read MoreArs Cantata
By Poetry Issue 76
My better angel, my necessary, my made or my born, my homunculus, dwarf star, burning-ship swimmer, my opal and orb, my one truth abandoning or abandoned, long oxbow and pest, my socket and thread, locus and shift, my betrayed and betraying, my thief at the window, broken my bottle, my child gone hungry, room laced…
Read MoreYam Kinneret: The Harp Music
By Poetry Issue 76
It is March; in Ireland daffodils will be suffering the harshest winds; here the coach had turned back from the slopes of the Beatitudes towards Tiberias; to the right the valleys, green and flush, rising to the hills; to the left, the lake, quietened in an evening lull and pleasuring; I settled in my seat,…
Read MoreJesus Called
By Short Story Issue 76
M Y SISTER, SONDRA, stood on my porch smoking a cigarette, just like she does every Wednesday while her son practices soccer at the school three blocks from my house. “Alisa, you ever been around one of them savants? Like the one that was in that movie Rain Man?” Cigarette smoke rose and fought against the…
Read MoreAnd Not as a Stranger
By Short Story Issue 76
S HE WAS A BEAUTIFUL child and then a beautiful girl who seemed protected by an aura of goodness so that lascivious men kept their thoughts to themselves and didn’t lay a hand on her. But one afternoon her luck ran out during a hurricane which brushed New England in September of 1948. Her mother’s…
Read MoreCourtyard of the Gentiles
By Essay Issue 76
A S I WRITE, POPE BENEDICT XVI has just departed by helicopter from the Vatican to begin his retirement. It is a safe bet that in the flood of commentary on his legacy little attention will be paid to one of his more inconspicuous initiatives—the “Courtyard of the Gentiles.” But to my mind, this little program,…
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