Sublime

Women of Ireland. After Rembrandt. The three of them looking out at me like the men of the Drapers’ Guild, red on their skirts, black on their chests, dark shawls over their heads, though my mother’s hair is bare.

innocents

Burns was

lucent

The monks arrived as early as the fifth and sixth centuries A.D., having sailed and rowed from the west coast of Ireland. Setting out in small, open boats called curraghs, built from cowhide stretched over light wicker frames, they crossed one of the most treacherous stretches of ocean in the world without knowing what, if anything, they’d find on

shoats,

She might be very young, or her own age.

In 2019, the Highlander Center’s main office building caught fire. This was just a year after another, more publicized fire had raged in Tennessee’s mountain range. That was discovered to be an adolescent accident, tragic but largely innocent. This time, in the detritus and ash left after the flames were extinguished, a souvenir remained. It was a