A quarterly journal of ideas, art, and faith
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. 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...]
Time takes miles from life, years rolling out, tolling mpg’s,
From a perpetually restless motor. The past, awkward and unwieldy,
Is a highway map folded in confusion’s haste.
It goes too far back for me to follow.
You become an absence, the might of a subjunctive ghost,
Expected as a radio station
And the time and place its fading signal finally dies. [Read more...]
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...]
Amanda Glass
Do you know Slim the Cowboy, the Hero of the West? He found a rattler by the sofa, bravely beat it up. He saved his friend the sheriff when the local gang got rough, Then drank his campfire coffee from his pewter loving-cup. That’s Slim, in his bandana and fleece vest. Did you see Slim the Cowboy as he galloped into town? He left his mustang Star tied in the stable-yard out back (That stable looks suspiciously like my green baker’s rack), Then sat down at the bar and had a sliced-banana snack. That’s Slim, in small snow-boots of blue and brown. [Read more...]
Gabriel Olearnik
Outlanders are the salvation of shapes
the tailored jut of shoulders
the square thighs
face-handlebars
centaur-pilots half a century ago. [Read more...]
