A quarterly journal of ideas, art, and faith
David Landrum
1. I pray for him each morning. Denied a place where my virginity could flourish, I became obedient to a husband who joked on our wedding night how I had narrowly escaped having my pretty little thing locked up where no one could enjoy it. [Read more...]
Gabriel Olearnik
Adebanke Where are you? My child my child my daughter Ade with the cat's eyes Where are you? You were walking amid the marrow-grass and asphodel When the fronds came between you and the tribe Now the sun sets and the red roars begin [Read more...]
These cells of light, glowing with
the fat of flowers,
the entrails of summer:
it rises to a rhyme, the hum of fire
the laughing buds of radiant heat.
Oh, attend those burning prayers of bees
the censered sound of poured honey
a guttering, dribbled benediction, and in the temple all the
insects cry:
Glory.
Kate Bluett
The mesquite is not a tree although it can be climbed. There was one on the playground, and the pretty girls claimed it for their own. They laughed among its leaves of lace while we less-favored sweated in the sun. [Read more...]
Amanda Griswold
He did not get my soul without a fight,
But foaming, seething, reeling in my brain,
I bowed to darkness and emerged in light.
My mind was scorched by shadows grown too bright.
The demon smoldered and I roared in pain.
He did not get my soul without a fight. [Read more...]
Joseph O’Brien
For Max Pizarro I God almighty! The puissant progress of it all! Arch-mad with digits, The 20th century summed up through a fogged pane of sky-blue limits, Its typeset changes out each Pater Noster for news, front-page and back. These are outside happenings which remand nothing—for thou art Naught to me! Yet they require my innermost fealty of stone-to-heart, Even as the stone grows smaller, harder, more cardiac.
[Read more...]
J.B. Toner
A sad grey dawning, this; a sad grey cloud Bemists the morning’s eye with doleful mirk; And under dreary treetops’ drizzling shroud, Bedraggled crows in lonely murders lurk. The whiskey's all but spent, the wine is lost; The beer-fen on the bare cold floorboards molders; The fridge holds half a jar of apple-sauce; The last butt in the brimming ashtray smolders. [Read more...]
Gabriel Olearnik
Suffering reknits creation. In suffering we become the actors in the divine drama, until the beauty of the uncreated is made fully manifest.Op. cit 32.
There is a traced place around the drag of your eyes what a traitor the face is. Here, the forehead is like sand Here, the mouth torn with terse flattery as if the lips were scarred by threadpoint. In the badlands of your youth the wilderness of first loving walking with you was like dark walnut with a hint of fire and your smile broke teeth. [Read more...]
The glacial white paint comes peeling away
From the monumental doorframe,
Peeling away in great strips like some fabulous
Undiagnosed disease:
And the columns all around are cold and mottled,
Pale and dead and grey.
I stand at the grate,
Looking in through holy prison-bars
Rich with swirling ironwork arabesques
Moorish Palermo turned baroque. [Read more...]
“Well, Mick, what’s this stuff called again—Bushmills?
It’s very good, but I’ve had better yet:
The scarlet ale of Aztec altars wet,
The absinthe of an abdicated will,
The mead of churning spilth from poison mills,
The wine of groaning thralldom’s tortured sweat,
The black milk of despair from souls of jet,
Sweet seas of tears that drown the looming hills.” [Read more...]
