Last year, a student came to my office hours to discuss her post-graduation plans. She said she wanted to travel, teach, and write. “How about joining the Peace Corps?” I suggested. She grimaced. “The Peace Corps is problematic,” she said. I replied the way I always do when a student uses that all-purpose put-down. “What’s…
This is the work of your own hands strange to say, all these stories carved with a certain severity, each woodcut brought forward in strokes, a register of darkness removed. There’s a tower and a bridge. A figure midway across watches the shadows below. Midway between what? Today and tomorrow, if you like,…
It is not wholly myself, this shadow tugging itself loose as though it knew better where to go from here what to do and see before the ship leaves with the tide. Not a thousand ships, you understand, just the one. Tall and proud, I suppose, and in a dreadful hurry, what with the wind…
It has been here as long as I have I think, settling in the sand. The current drags through like a wind, carrying small reef-building creatures to this outpost. When I was a child it looked different. It was a room then, the brass knobs spit-shined and the drawers filled with carefully folded clothes;…
I burned a hole in cloth, watching the threads shrivel back like the stockinged legs of the wicked witch of the east, who leaves no path of return so you had better keep those shoes on while you learn to grow up with your mistakes like good siblings: you will fight but make…
We live in a state of constant strife; the truths we relied on no longer seem certain; we are unsettled, shaken, adrift. Even those of us lucky enough to retain our health, homes, families, and jobs feel exiled from the lives we once knew. The bonds of friendship and community that secured us have loosened,…
I On New Year’s Day in 1863, Thomas Wentworth Higginson was stationed in the Sea Islands of South Carolina, presiding over a large group of Unionist whites and formerly enslaved black workers who had gathered to celebrate the Emancipation Proclamation. A prominent prewar abolitionist, Higginson had recently become commander of one of the first black…
Edith Stein, a soulful modern thinker, was murdered in Auschwitz in August 1942. Born to a Jewish family in 1891, she was baptized into the Catholic faith on New Year’s Day 1922. In October 1933, she began the process of becoming a Carmelite nun, in which capacity she would take the name Teresa Benedicta of…
Morning Song Love set you going like a fat gold watch. The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry Took its place among the elements. Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New statue. In a drafty museum, your nakedness Shadows our safety. We stand round blankly as walls. I’m no more…
On February 22, 1990, Vaclav Havel spoke to a joint session of the United States Congress as the newly elected president of a free Czechoslovakia. Just a few months earlier, he had been detained (the last in a long line of arrests) by the StB, his country’s infamous secret police; he said he didn’t know…
Was a swell commandment: drink up, sleep. She’d relinquished the vampy black and absconded to her toddler color (muddy sunset) as we, one from each grief stage, commissioned to flock her, petal’d her pale strapless, pressed the appliqué along her spine with dancer’s glue, all funds sunk into that silk, hence the wan hors d’oeuvres,…
Frigid in vibrating daylight, with no distinction between indoors and out. Ailene on the gurney asked her children, Am I dying? and received a coward’s answer. How she eyed the ward, panicked, more alive than ever. Once a lounging teenager, biting the brush end of her braid, the lattice more alive than ever with…
