As the story goes— to achieve a long life and a peaceful death, walk inland until the oar on your shoulder becomes, not an oar, but a winnowing fan. Only then will you understand: your lifetime of steering is over. You’ll have no choice but to acquiesce to what’s ahead. […]
Majorie Stelmach
Marjorie Stelmach is the author of five volumes of poems, most recently Falter, (Cascade). Her work has appeared in Boulevard, Florida Review, Gettysburg Review, Hudson Review, Image, New Letters, and Tampa Review. She is the recipient of the 2016 Chad Walsh Poetry Prize from The Beloit Poetry Journal.
Everything Meant Only Itself
Only madmen and mystics live without metaphors. —Patrick Harpur The story: Once upon a sabbatical, a hermit rented a small hut. He yearned to be a mystic, discover God or, failing that, learn what it meant to be alone. Settling in, he found he liked the little tasks of living, keeping to […]
If a Tree Falls in a Forest and No One
Would it have mattered if, as children, we’d been taught to attend to the vanishing? If we’d practiced hearing the migrating songbirds churring above us each autumn, or the waning buzz of insect wings in the meadow as summer lifted away? If we’d risen at dawn for the synchronized hatch of […]
Guilt Litany
Have mercy, Lord on the old and ill, clothed in what came, this day, to hand, their buttons misaligned, their Velcro’d shoes; on the fragile ones awaiting word— the hospice call, eviction, a uniform at the door, the biopsy, the ultrasound; on men and women off their meds and on their […]
How Long?
At the end of this day there remains what remained yesterday and what will remain tomorrow: the insatiable, unquantifiable longing to be both the same and other. The Book of Disquiet Fernando Pessoa Storms tore down a city’s worth of leaves last night, and now I’m up to […]
My Mother’s Sparrow Song
In the story of Bede’s sparrow (found in Venerable Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People— 731 C.E.), the human condition is compared to the flight of a sparrow. Just as a sparrow entering from the stormy winter skies flies the length of a warm, lit mead hall and back again into the harshness of the night, “this […]