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  • Life of the Senses

    1. Over and over, I think we have come to a place like this, dead sound stopping the soul in its eager conversations Or, a classical theme repeated over and over interrupted by a voice disguised as human: Please stay on the line Your call is very important to us 2. Don’t know if I…

  • A Spell to Wake My Brother

    We will weave through the labyrinth of headstones to clear the patch of soil where you rest, to plant a tall palm with leaves that know that north sea breeze, to roast a suckling pig. The blood of this pig will mingle with your bones, tickle your limbs, awake the bomba y plena pulse. We…

  • Curvy

    One day I get tired of crying and feeling sorry for myself—I’m not starving, I’m not in a war, I’m not crippled—and decide to track down my real father’s phone number. Isn’t it about time? I’m practically thirty years old. This is my life, right now. I call Cleveland information. I don’t know why I’m…

  • About Joy Harjo

    To say this fine fall morning that Joy is in the air is true: courtesy of KSUT-FM, broadcasting from the Southern Ute Reservation, this startling cut from the CD Letter from the End of the Twentieth Century, half-read, half-sung, is one of many by Joy Harjo and her band, Poetic Justice, regularly heard on FM…

  • Blue Dementia

    In the days when a man would hold a swarm of words inside his belly, nestled against his spleen, singing. In the days of nightriders when life tongued a reed till blues & sorrow songs called out of the deep night: Another man done gone. Another man done gone.   In the days when one…

  • Contributors’ Notes

    MASTHEAD Guest Editor Joy Harjo Editor Don Lee Managing Editor Gregg Rosenblum Poetry Editor David Daniel Associate Fiction Editor Maryanne O’Hara Founding Editor DeWitt Henry Founding Publisher Peter O’Malley Assistant Fiction Editors: Jay Baron Nicorvo and Nicole Kelley. Editorial Assistants: Shannon Miller and Elizabeth E. Partfitt. Bookshelf Advisors: Fred Leebron and Cate Marvin. Proofreader: Megan…

  • Old Story

    from The Diary of Francis Kilvert   One bell wouldn’t ring loud enough. So they beat the bell to hell, Max, with an axe, show it who’s boss, boss. Me, I dreamt I dwelt in someplace one could relax but I was wrong, wrong, wrong. You got a song, man, sing it. You got a…

  • Deception

    Has a glow to it, distant and round at the end of the mine shaft, a yellow malignant light. Once seen, it loses power, becomes tarnished and dull as river stones, lifted from their affair with water. Money that has lain too long in the vault no longer has value. The currencies we so believed…