Poetry inspired by Injustice (1941), a mural by Maxo Vanka at St. Nicholas Catholic Church in Millvale, Pennsylvania. Editor's Note: The contents of this poem include graphic reference to domestic violence and sexual assault. Photo courtesy of Society to Preserve the Millvale Murals of Maxo Vanka. Photo credit: Rob Long/Clear ...
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Illustration by Izumi Miyazaki The eighty-year-old priest Mario waited alone for Marcus in the Windmill Church. It was the second month that the city had been shut down because of COVID, and all the churches were closed. Mario sighed loudly and looked out the window at Wigwam Street. Neither this ...
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Living in the Promise of the Future I was a futurist, imagining utopian life ahead. Now here I am, I’m halfway dead. I thought scientists would defeat death. Yet here I am, ripping bread with my teeth. In forty years, we won’t need teeth. I’ll be eighty then, close to ...
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DIMENSIONS You can’t know for sure When hope really dies Or if it dies last But only feel That it defers its big plans For an undefined future. And because This future itself Is also in the future Your fingers have learned How to sift every scrap of coincidence Then ...
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It’s May: no fallen leaves to herd into interrogatives. Still, the wind searches, calling the names of those it’s driven out. The time between gatherings meanders on the year’s grid, a river forced northward, like a graph that shows the country repeating mistakes in two different centuries. Absence takes the ...
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