You could not call it an actual crucifixion, Doctor Hébert thought, because it was not actually a cross. Only a pole, or a log, rather, with the bark still on it and scars on the bark toward the top, from the chain that had dragged it to this place, undoubtedly. A foot or eighteen inches…
A crucifix on a bare wall. Crocheted cincture with a lover’s knot tied at each end, which swing as you walk (also known as “nun’s balls”). The veil, with or without wimple. Crepe-soled, lace-up oxfords, black, or sandals, preferably Dr. Scholl’s. A watch, plain, and your pectoral cross on a black string— small enamel for…
The trees, so white and so many. I don’t remember it this way. Their slender trunks a comfort. You surrender, that’s all. To a man, to a drug, to wall after wall of birch. It’s not unpleasant. Winnie, steel-gray in October. Whitecaps. This is where nostalgia will take you: a mean wind, a sleety snow…
MASTHEAD Guest Editors Russell Banks and Chase Twichell Executive Director DeWitt Henry Managing Editor & Fiction Editor Don Lee Poetry Editor David Daniel Assistant Editor Jessica Dineen Founding Publisher Peter O'Malley Staff Assistants: Stephanie Booth and Jodee Stanley. Fiction Readers: Karen Wise, Billie Lydia Porter, Holly LeCraw Howe, Barbara Lewis, Maryanne O'Hara, Sara Nielsen Gambrill,…
It descends with the Holy Spirit over your face, breasts, legs, draping the flesh in modesty, a falling curtain of grace, and you: an empty dress-shape with a scapular, a cincture, and a veil, receptacle of God’s will. Unless, of course, your body is a swamp of desire, your heart a simmering kettle, its…
The last deportations from the town in Poland where my father had been born, and where his parents lived, were carried out in October 1942. The town was declared Judenrein. This word was written in the center of the green ruled page that my father found when he returned to Poland after the war. It…
Continental Drift, Russell Banks’s fifth novel, begins with an invocation: “It’s not memory you need for telling this story … it’s clear-eyed pity and hot, old-time anger and a Northern man’s love of the sun, it’s a white Christian man’s entwined obsession with race and sex and a proper middle-class American’s shame for his nation’s…
O Lord my God, in thee do I put my trust. Save me from them that pursue me and deliver me, Lest they tear my soul like a lion. i. The torment of voices: When are you going to get . . . When are you going to be . . . Who will you…
Jerusalem, September 1993 for Raphi Amram How long my hands have been well-worn thoughts of an automatic rifle. Ajar, my wrought-iron gate. A mulberry tree, in leaf, is shadowing the courtyard tiles; the back of my hand pouring wine’s caught in a dark pattern. The walled Old City stares across the valley, all luminous stone…
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