by Heidie (Raine) Senseman

After I spin out on Route 72, Officer David taps on my window, kicking through the snow-dense ditch to peer in. He drops his head like a mother chimp, sinking into his shoulders to center himself

by Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew

“What’s calculus?” Gwyn asked over dinner. Fourth grade awakened in our daughter a love of numbers. Exponents, factorials, variables, and other mathematical terms I hadn’t used since high school became a regular part of conversations.

by Sarah Law

“And then our Lord opened my spiritual eye and showed me my soul in the midst of my heart. I saw my soul as large as an endless world…and an honorable city.”

—Julian of Norwich Revelations of Divine Love, Chapter 67

by Heather Morton

From an early age I longed to dwell in the realm of story. Through novel reading, imaginative play, and privately concocted stories,

by Ethan Stanton

I follow the only light through rising wind, enter the empty office for my nightheart appointment. A random, fluorescent temple. Crash landing on an abandoned planet.

by Rebecca Moon Ruark

What to do with my hands at Mass now, where there is no shaking of hands at the exchange of peace?

I hold my hands tightly together, not in prayer but in futility.

by Basira Harpster

I put an ad in the county paper: House Wanted with room for garden, for woman with one good dog. Wood heat OK, no plumbing necessary….

by Jeannine Marie Pitas

My Not-Daughter

I try to become your mother by signing on a line. First, I must cross two languages. Ixil is a coat that surrounds you, protecting you from the white walls' coldness, the waiting rooms, and questioning eyes.

Finding Hope in the Existential Time Warp of Acedia 

by Nicole M. Roccas

When acedia “creeps over the heart of a monk,” wrote John Cassian in the early fifth century, “he looks about anxiously this way and that . . . and frequently gazes up at the sun, as if it was too slow in setting, and so a kind of unreasonable confusion of mind takes possession of him like some foul darkness, and makes him idle and useless for every spiritual work” (Institutes 10.2).  

by Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew

When I was in seventh grade, my family drove up from New York to Vermont over winter break to cross-country ski.