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Contributors’ Notes

MASTHEAD Guest Editor Martin Espada Editor Don Lee Managing Editor Robert Arnold Poetry Editor David Daniel Associate Fiction Editor Maryanne O"Hara Founding Editor DeWitt Henry Founding Publisher Peter O"Malley Assistant Fiction Editor: Jay Baron Nicorvo. Editorial Assistants: Elizabeth Partfitt and Laura Wareck. Bookshelf Advisors: Fred Leebron and Cate Marvin. Proofreader: Megan Weireter. Poetry Readers: Simeon…

Contributors’ Notes

beth alvarado‘s story "Just Family" is from her collection, Not a Matter of Love, which won the MVP award from New Rivers Press and will be published in fall 2006. Her fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in Calyx, Northwest Review, Spork, and Cue, a journal of prose poetry. She is a lecturer at the…

Some Writers in Wartime

What is essential as breath reduced to a squabble about moral parity to hold a brief for the party that orders death. Moral parody: ours is but to cook, serve, clear, speak when spoken to. * We will not swell the glory chorus, slaughter calling to slaughter like lovers possessed. Nor will we turn away….

Just Family

Rachel was the one who delivered the message. In the middle of dinner, she remembered the phone call, stood up, tossed her braid over her shoulder, and dug in her pocket for a scrap of paper. "Mom," then she looked warily at her father, "Dad, the prison called again today." She squinted at her eight-year-old…

Blackouts

rolled through the city. Whoever has an answer won’t last. Traffic muscles through. Whole families lazing on steps eating grapes. “No I’m not,” says the youngest to her canary. “You grew into your legs, Tall One, didn’t you.” Then no one. Loosed papers flatten the fences. Bits of glass rest there and burn. This part…

Instead Of

This is a story about not doing; this is a story about everything else. The trouble with writing is that it’s too easy not to do. Imagine if eating chocolate was as easy not to do as writing. Or paying your mortgage. Or making an eight o’clock class. Imagine if you were firmly convinced that…

Cowboy Honeymoon

Kaufman drove from one fire to another. In Baltimore, there had been a train wreck in the Howard Street tunnel, the northern end of which was not far from the small house he owned, tucked away on a side street behind the hulking wreck of a Victorian hotel, and three doors down from a gay…

Talk

  Marie parks in the circular drive where the front lawn had been grass the summer before. But nothing so beautiful, nothing so inherently good, about grass. The paving job was done by her cousin William’s own company, which he’d started after deciding it was too difficult to make a living as a fisherman. Hippie-ish…

More than Peace and Cypresses

More than peace and cypresses, emboldened hares at the field’s edge, Father, I love gallantry, tenacity, the sanguine heart before the ledge: the artist questing and failing— the feet of bested Icarus plunging into the sea’s crest— the artist triumphing: a page of fire from the book of heroes. More than light-hooved gazelles, views from…