Outstanding Work | Rotten 2025
Contrition
Father Michael shouldered a scatter
of bent vows, a left-behind child.
In rows of pews she stares from kneeler
to window to confessional door.
Out by the highway in the light
of my phone after our time by the swing
I didn’t know if I was alone, she says.
It’s a week’s walk to heaven’s back door,
he says, we’ve only six-some days of water.
God’s weathervane assured her that morning:
a miracle and a job by year’s end.
That night, upstairs, he worried the fog,
thought on her, blew smoke out the window.
Thirty-odd trees edged the pond,
a clew of geese, a leaf-clogged drain,
twenty-some cattails caught in the wind.
Years on the child kicks at her seat,
some man shouts to stop that already.
Nightly still, decades from his rosary gather
in god’s white fathom, fall on her as rain.
Middling
Less the father, less the son,
more the empty hall between each one.
Less the left, less the right,
more her eyes in the mirror from either side.
Less the beginning, less the end,
more the papers in the mail she thought she’d never send.
Less the foreground, less the back,
more the screen she stares through as she packs.
Less what’s open, less what’s closed,
more the boy’s undone coat and the door before they go.
Less the mother, less the son,
more the father’s outline where there used to be someone.
Water is the Best Conductor
Years from now it’ll be said
The Trial at the Crossing
led to The Night of Sundown Lovers,
that when the cold spells began
Lake Mary’s water haunted
our kitchens as we slept.
Some weeks before, a childless
Sunday couple made love
while their dinner burned
leaving no choice but burgers
at Kelly’s Tavern where hours
before it’s said a man won
two hundred in pull-tabs,
bought a round putting Helen
one over, so she slept in her car,
woke to men with a tow truck
staring in the dusk light. No,
it’s fine, I’ll make it home,
they said she said. On the bridge
home she saw the shadow
of the couple as they jumped.
Though she stopped, they’d
gone well under. For a week
men dragged the bottom.
They were so in love, it’s said
they feared the other would die
first so ended it together.
As they fell, a thought
of a child swam in her,
it’s ghost grew apart from her,
then after pulled through the pipes
of houses and offices, though
not the sheriff’s – for no child
unmoored from its mother so
would haunt a jail when it could
haunt a hundred houses, no?
Sean M. Conrey
Sean M. Conrey is an associate director Syracuse University Project Advance. His most recent full-length collection of poems, The Book of Trees won a 2018 Catholic Press Award. His poems have appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Notre Dame Review, Ruminate, and The Wayfarer, among many others.
Header image by Josh Applegate
