Ode to Silence
Glory to the half rest, to the breath between the third and fourth beats, the dwindling arrow of the decrescendo, to the sunrise over Malibu, and its sleeping starlets, the empty horizon, the city’s great thought…
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Introduction to Lindsay Stuart Hill
Lindsay Stuart Hill’s two poems were written after a stay at Zen Mountain Monastery in upstate New York. Zen texts and the practice of meditation have influenced many of Hill’s recent poems. In a letter to me, she wrote: “As I reread these monastery poems, for me they are centered on the fundamental tension that…
Paramour
The tribute was held downtown, far away from the theater district. Christine crossed the street gingerly, on four-inch heels thin as pencils—Ivan had always loved women in high heels—and checked the address against the invitation in her purse. The building was new and modern, the front window lettered with Cyrillic characters and a boldface translation:…
Hitting and Getting Hit
They could say what they liked, imitate the way I stuttered the morning Pledge, mashed the alphabet, ask how many chickens 1 plus 3 made, why my brain sat in a corner, in a class of one, refused to read or write, was nailed to my tongue, just as long as they understood that some…
Introduction to Jynne Dilling Martin
Jynne Dilling Martin completed her MFA from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers, where I teach, and although she was never my student, except in the occasional workshop, I’ve kept my eye on her. From the start her impressive gifts included a distinct voice— headlong, unprotected, usually jazzed, sometimes manic, often very funny, and always…
Prelude, Delay, and Epitaph
1. A finger is cut from a rubber glove And clamped as a tourniquet around my toe. The gouging ingrown nail is to be removed. The shots supposed to have pricked and burned The nerves diabetes has numbed never notice. The toe, as I watch, slowly turns a bluish Gray, the color of flesh on…
The Gospel of Blackbird (Emerging Fiction Writer’s Contest)
As John hurried to the resident locker room after doing his rounds at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, he noticed a sixtyish Korean lady in red sweats cautiously stalking him from about twenty feet away. At first, John thought the wrinkled woman might be a figment of his overworked brain, as he was always tired to the…
Introduction to Barbara Perez
When Barbara Perez moved from San Antonio to Boston—a city she’d never visited—to join a new program’s first MFA class, she revealed a certain willingness to take risks. Her work radiates the same willingness, using logic twined with metaphor to explore passion’s depths. In poems like “Bottle,” mindfulness is the natural way to express feeling…
Code Blue
Iris wants to walk on the beach with her feet in the ocean and the sun on her face. She wants to eat greasy hamburgers and drink pints of beer and throw peanut shells on the floor. She wants to wear high heels, polish the silver, dance the tango, bake a cake, plant peonies, daydream,…