Hilary Sideris

Francis

He never regretted
disrobing in Assisi’s

piazza; flinging fine
silks into his earthly

father’s arms; wanting
no part of the business;

living shiftless on
alms, but begged his

palms’ forgiveness
for the driven nails,

the black, ecstatic
excrescences.

****

Hilary Sideris lives in Brooklyn, New York, where she studies Italian and develops programs for nontraditional college students at The City University of New York. She has her MFA from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as Arts & Letters, Cimarron Review, Confrontation, Connecticut Review, The Evansville Review, Green Mountains Review, Grey Sparrow, Gulf Coast, Mid-American Review, The Normal School Magazine, PMS, Poet Lore, Quiddity, Tar River Poetry, and Women’s Studies Quarterly, among others. Her first and third chapbooks, The Orange Juice is Over and Gold & Other Fish, have been published by Finishing Line Press, and her second chapbook, Baby, was published by Pudding House Press.