Article

Introduction

In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a boy turns into a daffodil, a girl turns into a tree, a husband and wife turn into snakes and slither away together. The fisherman Glaucus, seeing the fish he’s just caught return to life after he’s spread them out on the meadow, eats one of the strange leaves they’re lying on…

The Van

In the van we are as corks in water, bobbing, filled with air. Earplugs jam up my ears with the simple fact that a secret music illuminates the window-better from my side of the inside seat, crammed up against a housewife, cow-like from Des Moines with wads of Kleenex in her fist, arriving with Broadway…

Reunion

When Anna Green walked into the ballroom for the twentieth reunion of Surfview High in Los Angeles, she did not predict that she would fall in love with Warren Vance. She joined her classmates, in their finery, penned by the hotel"s large glass windows, the sky outside black and the cars on the freeways arranged…

The Failed Trick

The white mouse went first, pink eyes, pink feet, then the ace of hearts, the quarter and half-dollar,     the pigeon, the cat, once the dog, who didn’t howl for a good hour,     wherever he was, our old man’s hands faster than our eyes as we lined up on the picnic table seat to…

Does She Have a Name?

The intern’s wand assayed your abdomen with wavelengths    sounding the nocturnal pool she swam within    pale cave dweller    tipped down to pass between existences    asleep forehead globed beneath her body’s question There she is    Everything’s okay    except the blood    a sudden flux enriched your gown tear in the placental wall    Nothing wrong the intern said   …

When the Stars Begin to Fall

  The men and women of the Causon Creek Church of God with Signs Following were expecting families from congregations all over the South to attend their annual homecoming services, some from hundreds of miles away. Most would cross the Tennessee border from North Carolina, Virginia, and Kentucky, though a few were coming from states…

Three Lanterns

There’s our son at the end of my hook     riding over the Detroit River where Tecumseh’s still rowing     towards his oblivion. This boy we’re casting to the land     of the leaping frogs. My lass lives on the floor     where the fish are frying, her spine snapped in half     the way…