This bowl must have been hanging in its treeabove the cars and parking meters, above menwrapped like pods and sleeping in doorways,above the coffee cup lids, newsprint cubism, andthe quintillion cigarette remnants of sidewalk still life.And now it’s underfoot, a sudden flash on wet pavement,it

The old woman in ICU wants to rail against the Church.Patriarchy, she says, hierarchy, and I agree.She looks just like my mother.But you’re dying, I say.Why are we talking about this?Why does any of this matter?And the sun slants through the dusty window.My Roman collar chafes.On the monitor,

Kissing the cross,O precious cross,it blisters the lipslike the hot coalheld to Isaiah.O holy cross,there is a body on itwith a deep woundthe wound dealt by the worldto the hopes of God.O beautiful Godunrecognizablewho could not let us bein our blind man’s bluffour cruel humorsO spent fleshtha

We do not in our countryniche you at corners,crossroads, highway shrines.But in Karen’s face as she talks of her sonwhose pain will not redeem the world;as Marguerita, whose eldest will notsurvive her; in Sylvie, whose childlearned all his letters in his second yearand by age four had been con

The city suffocates with the smellOf hemp, soaked in blood, everywhere.Hour after hour after hour she tossesFrom one nightmare to another.Her bed sheets, once silveredWith the scent of nard, taste of gall.She dreams she sees her husband, the prefectOf equivocation, leaning over the porticoTrying to

In the stories I return to, people love each otherindirectly. Offering coins, their moonlitfaces. Not receiving too much credit.Like the man at work today who answered“How are you?” with “Blessed.” I thought,that’s not an answer to the question.Afterward, I spent the da