Ellen Bryant Voigt

We came with the children up out of the Metro thinking about the heroes we had seen on the large dark canvasses in the Louvre, how they knew to look directly was to be turned to stone, or lost, or to lose whatever fluttered near the periphery, the wa [...]

This time they're thirteen, no longer interested in the trillium on the path but in each other, though they will not say so. Only the chaperone lingers at the adder's tongue, watching the teacher trail the rest uphill to where the dense virginal fore [...]

Every summer, after the slender dogwood by the porch has dropped its scalloped blossoms, my sister moves back into the carcass of our house. Most of the old belongings are disbursed, most of the photographs, the lamps, the quilts, the small unravelin [...]

This is how it was: they had their own churches, their own schools, schoolbuses, football teams, bands and majorettes, separate restaurants, in all the public places their own bathrooms, at the doctor's their own waiting room, in the Tribune a column [...]

Not smart, not pretty, not especially kind, one of a million sparrows in God's eye, she sits in a middle pew this hot second Sunday in July, All Day Meeting and eating on the grounds. Home for the day, wearing a fuchsia dress and precarious smile she [...]