Does your national identity influence you?

M.E. Walsh, in her Creativity Series interview, asked if my national identity influences me. As I’m in the middle of an interview now for NYC’s Brooklyn Rail magazine – in which we examine the contentious concepts of exile and liminality – it dawned on me that the idea of national identity is integral to this…

Sacré Coeur & Wound Man

Sacré Coeur & Wound Man (First published in The Cincinnati Review, Issue 15.1, 2017) A painting of the Virgin hangs at the foot of my bed. She wears her sacré coeur like a brooch, fastened with a sword through her chest. Mary’s sacred heart is crowned with flowers, just as gravestones are. I wish I…

Laughter & Forgetting

     (First published in Cutbank, 2018) Then it came, real laughter, total laughter, taking us into its immense tide. Bursts of repeated, rushing, unleashed laughter, magnificent laughter, sumptuous and mad.                                                    …