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By Tony Woodlief
This is the blood, David tells himself. He twists open the bottle and pours its dark content into a blue plastic cup. The label declares that this is Balanced NutritionTM, but David whispers: “Sanguis Christi.” He feels a shiver of sacrilege. On the days when his strength has worn thin as thread, it’s the wisps of liturgical Latin, of all things, that give comfort. This is why he whispers Sanguis Christi as he fills his daughter’s cup.
They are sitting on the big bed in David and Kate’s room. Amy, who is three years old, is nestled between David’s thighs, her back to his stomach, her head against his chest. She whimpers on occasion, but mostly she is distracted by something near the ceiling. It may be a peculiarity of light and shadow, or an illusion inspired by the rot in her brain, or something else altogether. David doesn’t notice, because he is praying that the Balanced NutritionTM or Sanguis Christi will heal the tumor mashing his daughter’s brainstem to pulp.
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Read more... [The Glass Child]
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Barbara Crooker
The thick syrup of birdsong pours over our heads,
and the afternoon drowses in the heat. Only the butterflies
are industrious, skipping from the foxgloves to roses
the color of old bricks. Even in her wheelchair,
my mother is still surprised when she sees one pink waterlily
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Read more... [June]
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I am the door, says Christ. And I am stilled, completely taken by this image of God as an entrance. It’s because our second child, a baby girl, was born last month and she has me thinking, thinking about arrivals, births, and entrances, and about the beauty surrounding them.
This is her story: I was attending a local writers conference and after a very busy day—writing workshops, surviving an hour of public speaking (I led a session on literary magazines), and a poetry reading from Denver’s poet laureate Chris Ransick—I drove home through the beginnings of a very wet spring storm and went into labor. She was born the next morning: our beautiful IlaJane Van Dyke. 6 pounds, 15 ounces, and 7 inches of new snow.
I can’t help but ponder that stimulatingly literary day and question whether the hum and buzz of all those writing-minded souls was the impetus for her arrival. Maybe she heard Chris Ransick reading those lines about the river’s water and “mornings when magpies squawk the world awake” and just decided she couldn’t wait any longer—that ours was a world worth meeting.
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Read more... [Issue 12 Editor's Note]
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Notes
Editor's
From You
Artist's
Last
Poetry
Karen Kelsay: Creating a Pastoral Scene
Patricia Butler: The Uninvited Goat, Birdsong
John Philip Johnson: The Ascension
Sarah LeNoir: When You Were Being Made New
Ashlee M. Davidson: Apology to a Beggar Woman on the Steps of Notre Dame
Leland James: Hard Candy Lace
Sarah Estes Graham: Cave Air, Golden-Haired Mary
Eric Potter: Evensong
Jenny Gillespie: Proud Warrior
Richard Sederstrom: Moss
Rosanne Osborne: Complicity, The Passion
Barbara Crooker: June
Fiction
Matthew Ira Swaye, Falfurious
Tony Woodlief, The Glass Child
Art
Tyrus Clutter: Altarpiece of the Martyrdom of St. Bon, Altarpiece of St. Thomas Eliot, Altarpiece and Reliquary of St. Joseph, Altarpiece and Reliquary of St. Georges
Natalie Salminen Rude: Pattern of Chance, Grace for the Fallen
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Issue #12 
