Gene Fox From the midst of the nether world I cried for help.  —from the Book of Jonah A gray whale blows off Cardiff Beach, just beyond the glamour homes, boutiques, an ...

Rose Marie Berger Mass in Las Choapas, Mexico On my knees I beg forgiveness for my greed— and for starving m ...

Bree Devones Hsieh I The crumpled woman pushes through the door and sees your plump limp limbs held tight in my buckled arms. She remembers holding such sweet eternity. ...

Betsy Sholl Blindfolded and gagged, tossed in the back / of a car -- it's how they gather up young men / ...

Joseph Bathanti Hemorrhaging from the concertina / crown, brass knuckles, scourging, cigarette burns, / lurching the last meter of Golgot ...

Judith Werner Deep with one savior’s death, how many more? In observance of which, the Dresden burghers as usual held Shrove Tuesday circuses around Our Lady’s Church, the Fraue ...

Theodore Deppe Something called a GiveBox appeared this fall on Falckensteinstrasse, and my first gift was a memory: Dorothy Day, decades ago, gently quoting St. Basil to me: ...

Sandra M. Tully You wait a long time for Christmas morning drifting asleep even as the ebony slate of sky shatters in clarion silence Glory, Hallelujah! and shepherds in th ...

Elvis O. Alves He uproots teeth primordial in nature and that eat his soul with appetite the size of mercenary forces plundering a city whose inhabitants do not fight back beca ...

Mark Hiskes About love she was all wrong, / the old capitalist, patron saint / of the self-made rich. How well / she misunderstood the pa ...

Muriel Nelson On Proverbs 8 ‘The Hungry Soul in Pursuit of the Full Soul’ On Proverbs 8 My saints wo ...

Maritza Rivera "There is nothing casual / about casualties of war." There is nothing casual about ...

D.S. Martin You can’t desire to catch the sacred fish / as much as he desires to be caught / & yet / he darts through the dim depths ...

E. Ethelbert Miller "Denial / This has nothing to do with blackness. / This has everything to do with blackness." ...

Jeanne Murray Walker Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.                                                                 —Word ...

Belle Fox-Martin We are the lay of the land— / pocked, hilled, knowing every ember / and seed imprinted on our bones. ...

R.M. Blair While he was in jail, two policemen / came to his apartment, took / all his books, sat at his kitchen table / drinking his cof ...

Annie Deppe There were two sets of stairs: the front ones curving and formal while the backstairs rose steep as a canyon wall. As a girl, ...

Barbara Crooker The amaryllis bulb, dumb as dirt, inert, how can anything spring from this clod, this stone, the pit of some subtropical, ...

Ken Sehested We all knew it would come. Someday. Always later. Mañana . It comes for us all. Sure. Of course. We know that. Someday. Mañana . But when someday ...

Richard Schiffman Eschewing perfection, they knotted in a flaw, the human signature and kink that made the carpet whole -- not less perfect, but more for the fraying edge, th ...

Bill Wylie-Kellermann (for Daniel Berrigan on his ninetieth birthday) the heart dares the word dares the page ...

Scott Kinder-Pyle The purpose of poetry is to remind us how difficult it is to remain just one person, for our house is open, there are no ...

Sarah Browning In our city we see them sometimes. In our city we see them sometimes, out for the day with a ...

Sneha Abraham Touched your hem / A thousand times / A face just / Beyond my sight / Space between / Grace, grief ...

Joseph Ross This time they are the ones cauth, though they try to close their eyes. Here are working men wit ...

Noel Julnes-Dehner My husband, he die without water in desert. Walking Saudi Arabia -- no jobs in Yemen for policemen from Somalia. ...

Rob Soley My strokes are halting, not like the imagined fluidity of the monastic scribes, hunched, by candlelight, over some ancient text, ...

Temple Cone Bach wrote his solo cello suites as études, not for performance./ Imagine, the arpeggios of the first prelude, forever privat ...

Jeanne Murray Walker His friend Martha's making soup, because you still / have to eat. Meanwhile, back in the Garden / ...

Jesse Nathan No, nothing, she says, that is not God’s, and we approach a crow ripping the entrails of a truck-crushed fox, and the crow fl ...

Priscilla Atkins The hospital chaplain who sits in the room of a sick child in Chicago and brings the child to God—not with words but by h ...

Kevin Hadduck Over chatter of starlings and grackles, you hear your father’s voice, confident and constant as bee hum in the backyard of y ...

Richard Schiffman Somebody noticed this quaking purplish spray hung incongruous on late-winter's bough, and tied a festive bow of mul ...

Maryhelen Snyder The first thief and the second. The first thief For years the energy of my body came to m ...

Mary Anne Reese Alb: A white liturgical tunic worn as prayer for a heart protected from all stain and washed in the Blood of the Lamb. ...

Richard Hoffman Because I lay on my back as a boy in the grass of the small yard behind our house watching clouds move and become faces, m ...

David Denny Of all the saints, my Anthony, I love you best. For you did what I long to do: you walked away from a life of comfort and ease ...

Scott Cairns This is the Month, and this the happy morn Wherein the Son of Heav’ns eternal King, Of wedded Maid, and Virgin Mother born, ...

John Gosslee The ram’s horn bellowed. Fused with snapped spears and hatchet heads nicked shields covered the field, ...

Nancy White that light kept me a year in its grip first my feet caught fire then my blood we moved at the edge of endlessness headless han ...

Richard Schiffman To you who are lost today like a needle in a haystack, reading this poem alone. Alone, brother island, sister moon. The ...

Annie Deppe A grace of green, the underleaf of olive, the birdsong’s cradling. It’s as though A grace of green ...

Nicholas Samaras How the earth now struggles into spring.How the cold hangs on, each morning cracking to begin. ...

Pamela Porter Five desert photographs taken by Thomas Merton. Four cars or trucks were parked by the old dea ...

Heather Hallberg Yanda Violet, whispered Eve, because saying the names aloud made the act too real. Pansy and woodruff, the flowers so sma ...

Jacob Bathanti Who am I to cast light upon the human soul? Sitting down to write peace-verses for mercenary gain, Hunting for poems and ho ...

Rachel Guido deVries Imperfection is the place where the spirit enters, the small hole in your shirt, the loosening threads of carpet, the ...

Murray Bodo She consoles me as I meditate before Mass—Julian of Norwich, that is, who says, “We are clothed, wrapped in the goodness of ...

Chandy C. John Praise God for all things green Lime jello, blades of grass, emeralds Chameleons, the neon river frog Heavy papayas begging ...