A quarterly journal of ideas, art, and faith
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...]
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...]
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
that 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...]
“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...]
The work of salvation takes place in obscurity and stillness. In the heart’s quiet dialogue with God the living building blocks out of which the kingdom of God grows are prepared, the chosen instruments for the construction forged.
—St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross
I
Some will remember you for what they call you,
A fact or category, and some will
Remember chiefly how you died, and think
Of blood’s enthralling stain. Still others reach [Read more...]
Am I your favorite? you want to know.
And I say yes: As every breath I take’s
My favorite breath. If, say, you’re eight, that makes
You my favorite eight-year-old. Ditto
Ten, nine, seven, six, five, yada, zero. [Read more...]
Don Thompson
I. Kyrie
We grub, we scrape the hardpan,
water all summer and harvest
shallow abundance—but no mercy.
Kyrie eleison
The earth has turned its back on us,
yielding, for most,
only to the grave digger’s shovel. [Read more...]
Katy Willis
Now is the winter of my discontent To be reformed, transfigured into spring? I cannot seem to hold to anything That by this sudden blossom is not rent. I leave a love behind, unfathomed still; I have a hope before me, waiting yet; And trapped so, where no boundaries are set, I find a faith, an unexpected will. [Read more...]
I. What woman could bind
Death’s bane to flesh,
What mother dare
Her God to mortal;
What womb would bear
That mortal fare?
II. The purging flame
Burns in the bush–
The fertile virgin
Child-bearing,
In consummation
Unconsuming. [Read more...]
