A quarterly journal of ideas, art, and faith
Matthew Alderman
Vita Nuova, xxvi
I saw faded beauty once
Pass me by in a gallery of stippled Seurats:
Maybe she was an English teacher,
A soccer mom in homely new white sneakers,
A nurse in jade-green scrubs.
You would have never called her pretty,
Nor stopped, admiringly at a distance,
Draping a chaste lechery in classical garb with the wan
Affectations of swooning lovers,
And bothered to notice her. [Read more...]
Matthew Alderman
… Who delights to scatter such masterpieces
over the place where we spend our brief time of exile.
—St. Therese of Lisieux, The Story of a Soul
So I looked up from The Story of a Soul and
Put Therese and the Child Jesus to sleep.
And felt the quiet wash over my brain.
Everyone on the bus was drowsing in their naps,
But me.
Light danced on the leaves caught on the
Movie screen of the bus windshield.
The endless telephone poles seemed like rows of crosses,
While ranks of windmills blew on ridges
Grand enough for an army of giants:
Don Quixote’s nephilim come back from the dead. [Read more...]
Jonathan McDonald
1. Canticum
As a youth, St. Joseph is foretold in a dream of his marriage to the Theotokos.
I dreamed a dream one week ago,
That the moon, the sun, the stars, would bow to me,
Like a wife to the will of her lord,
Like a son to his father,
Like a slave to his master.
And I was
cut to the bone,
weak in my knees,
churned in belly,
trembling in hand,
plucked in sinew.
I told my dream to my brother
in confidence,
and he shared the shame of my heart to my father and mother and brothers,
and they mocked me. [Read more...]
It is the same. The twisted strands . . . of barbed wire, flesh now torn of plaited curls, freshly shorn of woven briars, crown of thorn. The bruised reed . . . freely blowing, sown in the distant sod trampled underfoot, by pris'ners heavy trod plucked, unbroken in the Son of God. [Read more...]
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...]
I am an Artist A Poet A Prodigal Preacher A Wanderer A Pilgrim I am a Truth Seeker A Hopeful Romantic A Lover A Fool Ever toeing the line between Foolish and Cool
I. The Cornucopia Emerging cold and desperate, his whiting breath Trails behind him like the old ship’s own signature Disgorged in blunt belchings of smoke from its belly Through a single squat stack piping up the trying pots. The wit-starved whaler tells his hunger-angry crew: Sing a tune from groggy memory; desires supply the words. There’s the sea and he scans it like a line of poetry [Read more...]
Watch the cooper resume his old manufacture, how the hollowing knife will carve perfect volume from imperfect nature. So we two, man and wife, embraced like oaken staves, these golden rings our hoops, this common life our cask, have joined our tapered selves. [Read more...]
my church is sending me to Mexico it was autumn of course a deviled egg and the three of us shared some rye bread the river was already frozen Ina, I have resolved to become a religious man
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...]
