J.B. Toner
(with apologies to G.M.H.) Stove-knobs, strange numbers, goblin-glinting dials, Flame-plates atop, caged conflagration hides, Broil, bake, baste, burn, bent digit-discs deride— O how to cook Spaghetti-O’s at whiles? [Read more...]
That My Kitchen is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Extinguisher
Barra’s Laird
Gabriel Olearnik
Palest is his face to me
my dearie.
Tis a tint
Of the overcook of mil’.
All hint of heat
Has left it.
Here ran his horse and hied through the heather
and ran a pretty mile from the brink o’ the river. [Read more...]
To Ithaca
Gabriel Olearnik
It is the Silver City. It cannot be visited.
Season of the Mists
It is the Silver City. But it is not made of silver silver would have frozen to grey ash silver would have burned to grey ash silver is too febrile an element to bear the fever of feral stars and we would never have made harbor. [Read more...]
Our Father
Joseph O’Brien
His head is weathered to the rain-greyed granite you can find Bald and cropping the turf on any old Irish hillside. His eyes, in kind, Are as hazel as the bay of Galway’s own self. His smile, though, is straight from a Hoboken bar, Arresting you with the no-nonsense laugh a Jersey City cop lives for As he asks you, almost prayerfully, to put up your hands. [Read more...]
Book Review: Ignatius Critical Editions
Ignatius Critical Editions
Edited by Joseph Pearce
Hamlet (William Shakespeare)
312 pp., $12.95, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-586-17261-9
Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
596 pp., $12.95, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-586-17263-3
The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oscar Wilde)
365 pp., $12.95, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-586-17262-6
Reviewed by Eleanor Bourg Donlon
Is Hamlet so rampant with bawdy jokes that it is simply a very long, very dirty “shaggy dog story”? [Read more...]
Irish Wake
Joseph O’Brien
for Patrick Slattery
And with the clashing of their sword-blades make A rapturous music, till the morning break... --W.B. Yeats We’re a nation of all talk, recording The story of our blood, registering Our complaints against Land, Lord and Love According to the latest government, Counting past grudges and future graces On our beads and in our pews as from the isles. [Read more...]
499
Enrique García Máiquez
Translated by David Alexander
To the 498 Spanish martyrs of the 1930s and all those who suffered religious persecution during the 20th century.
The militia men shoved him out of his house, ready to make him the 499th martyr for some future beatification. Don Bartolomé let himself be pushed along, knowing that he had few hopes. Just the same as always. When he discovered that the leader of the so-called Death Squadron was Manolito–the kid from las Tejas–he thought maybe all was not lost. He had been Manolito’s teacher in the town’s school and he knew well that the boy’s brute force was matched only by his pride. [Read more...]
Book Review: Redeemed
Katy Carl
Redeemed: A Spiritual Misfit Stumbles Toward God, Marginal Sanity, and the Peace that Passes All Understanding
by Heather King
Viking Press, 2008
238 pages, $24.95
After my recent conversation with Heather King, I am again left thinking about what self-gift means for the writer: “You willingly allow yourself to be consumed.” Of course, when King said this, she meant that writing consumes the writer, not that reading does. But “consuming” also connotes nourishment, refreshment. [Read more...]
Pity
Sarah Gajkowski-Hill
and we were supposed to recognize this dank silhouette: He--mottled, knotted, screaming shrugged into a lice and tick-eaten rag, wrapped tightly in her unwashed hair? light emanated from his bare footsteps his progress spreading a dim glow miles around, energy prompting boats he stood on to push themselves into the middle of lakes [Read more...]
Tears
J.B. Toner
This vale, tsunami-wracked and deluge-filled,
A rocking isthmus ringed with roiling foam,
And huddled under sobbing heavens’ gloam,
Where arks and barks beneath the dark we build,
To fare on tear-seas over earths we tilled
In warmer days before our sunlit home
Was swallowed up to lie with salted bones
Far, far below the stormclouds stirred and spilled—
Charybdis-whirling, roaring, plunging, curled
By moon-pull in a towering lonely tide,
This watered globe, this sorrow-soaking world: [Read more...]
