“These cliffs must have many secrets.” It is a sentence that has floated, fully formed, in and out of my thoughts since I arrived in Ireland. Now I say the words aloud for the first time. Breda Roche’s expression sharpens. “That, they do.” Her gaze on the winding street ahead of our car is grave….
All the positions are filled, the pastor said,but you could be a floater. MeaningI woke each morning not knowing and at breakfast a man named Archertold me what to get busy with. On MondayI hunched in the kitchen scrubbing beets. On Tuesday I helped the carpentersdismantle a barn’s gable. Weeks blurredlike faces seen from a…
all at once you are inside & outside & closer to god I like the balconybest when it’s raining over the railing vertical garden strawberrystrawberry if I wanted to shout at the masses in all manner of witnessI would bend over this balcony light as my sniper’s bullet & fill myfists with fruit grace me…
in the shelter of pine boughs the needles patterning our skin. What we did under the tree or what we tried to do, or what was done, what we told ourselves when we were home lying in our bunks at night while the neighborhood receded and shadows clawed at the windowpanes. Some days, the cones…
He said the sky is not blue or white or gray. It is the color of one septillion snowflakes falling to the ground. He said a septillion is one followed by twenty-four zeros. More zeros than you could ever write down in one sitting because you are an impatient child. An only child. A singularity,…
Illusions are art, for the feeling person, And it is by art that we live, if we do. —Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart I. Ora Fitz breakfasted on the terrace, her manner chaste, irreproachable. She scarcely inclined toward her food, showed small appetite and, afterward, dabbed her mouth with a pressed napkin, leaving…
Translated by Kari Dickson She has to get the asylum seeker back to the church. She found him wandering around in the woods behind the church, he’d had enough, he tried to tell her in a language she couldn’t understand, but she knew that was what he was trying to say, all the same; he…
In the morning, before we left, we presented my aunt with a gift from Indonesia, a package of luwak, one of four in Bon’s duffel. Civet coffee? she said, bemused. We were already savoring cups of coffee at her table, brewed in her coffee press from Arabica beans of her own supply. It’s an Indonesian…
No. 1. Keats reads to six in the village hall. ‘When old age shall this generation waste, Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,”—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’ Twelve hands make…
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