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  • Clarinet

    At the stained window, a morning jay. I stop my scissoring, as if I could reclaim a Santiago of bird-call and sudden ease, as if I could annul the battle-gray maze of gutting jails, courthouses, morgues— purgatory where I bend over the burlap, again and again, to show the world the smashed black bell of…

  • Drum

    He lunged for the shut-off switch when he heard the scream. But the brutal five-inch teeth on the rotating drum, designed to excavate the coal face, had already destroyed helmet and hair, scalp and brain. Its rotation diminishing now, the carbide-tipped cutter bits dripping with the miner’s mistake. The noise declining as the massive drum,…

  • Introduction

    I used to think a poem could become a flower, a bear, or a house for a ravaged spirit. I used to think I understood what it meant to write a poem, and understood the impetus to write, and even knew a little something of the immensity of the source of poetry. I was never…

  • Abraham and Isaac: I

    He took him outside and said, “Look toward heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them.” And He added, “So shall your offspring be.” I have lived in tents and know how faint a trace we leave behind us on the earth; how, when the body fails, the soul folds its…

  • 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…