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The Waning

When you’re sixteen with pristine nipples it’s hard to imagine you’ll go a little bit blind one morning years later trying to read a bottle, but in point of fact you’ll be standing in the shower in early fall in Maine at the age of 43, the water will be brisk and zesty, and though…

Blue Guide

The two-person elevator that smells of pastries makes my lover so close joy in him is sealed into my childhood. Days, dogs off the leash bark at fountain’s aerial braids of water. Nights, letters leak through a shutter. Visiting my country I am always a stranger but distance is familiar and light. In this happiness…

No Vacation for Maigret

Fifty years ago my mother’s hands held this detective novel. She knew the world included secret passions, vile schemes, threats. Who killed Lili Godreau? The question should not be left unanswered! From Poitiers come two young detectives, Piéchard and Boivert, they are not stupid but they lack intuition. When a second murder happens they have…

After the Persian

Here is a tawny doe who chews a reed’s tip; behind the reeds, a lion whose red tongue droops. Yet in the doe’s prayer, the lion is a singing bird, and in the lion’s prayer, the doe is a flowering tree. And in the bird’s prayer, the tree that blooms incarnadine and evergreen, is our…

South Street, October

(script for ten voices) Light Rain: Plink, plink. Nothing counts for much. Pedestrians: We might go get a sandwich. Do we have time? Sure we do. We might go and buy a jacket. Life: I am long, I am long. For you I am long (even if not for a few who suffer weird disasters…

Contributors’ Notes

Spring 2009   meena alexander‘s poetry includes Illiterate Heart, winner of the PEN Open Book Award, Raw Silk, and Quickly Changing River. She is editor of Indian Love Poems, and of the forthcoming Poetics of Dislocation (Michigan, 2009). She is Distinguished Professor of English at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, CUNY.   sinan antoon…

When I’m Gone

After my mother died, I needed a word to describe how I felt. When I couldn’t find one, I realized that what I needed was not so much a word, as a sound, a sob, or maybe even a howl, a noise only the other motherless could hear, and come running. If I couldn’t find…