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  • Contributors’ Notes

    MASTHEAD Guest Editor Amy Bloom 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 Editor: Jay Baron Nicorvo. Editorial Assistants: Rachael T. Brown and Emily Carlson. Bookshelf Advisors: Fred Leebron and Cate Marvin. Proofreader: Megan Weireter. Fiction Readers:…

  • The Afterlife

    Here are boys, still weak. When they speak                                                                   snow falls from their lips. Pale of hand and cheek, the motors that whirred in their chests have failed. + Their new city—buildings like a scrim                                                                  a god unfurled for them so it waves in the wind. + Lovely, strange, and chill. The boys are…

  • Sally the Slut

      The taxi pulled to a stop in front of a brownstone whose wrought-iron gate looked oddly familiar. It was a rainy Sunday evening. The last traces of light hung morosely in the sky, illuminating rows of brownstones whose façades were uniformly lifeless, as though everyone inside were hiding, or away. Jason fumbled with his…

  • More Awards

    more awards Our congratulations to the following writers, whose work has been selected for these anthologies: Best Stories—Jill McCorkle’s "Intervention," from the Fall 2003 issue edited by Alice Hoffman, will be included in The Best American Short Stories 2004. The anthology is due out this October from Houghton Mifflin, with Lorrie Moore as the guest…

  • When I Was a Jersey Girl

    When I was a Jersey girl I hid my Jersey ways. Predictable as milk, I paled predictably when New Yorkers said: Jersey? and they were right. They despised my yellow Jersey plates, my Garden State cockeyed, solipsistic, anesthetized take on pig farming in that isolate, Secaucus, my bowling with extended family at the Elizabeth Lanes—…

  • Who’s Your Daddy?

      Louis liked the paddle more than the man who swung it. He respected the instruction, the ritual, the organization of his thoughts when the paddle struck its target. He enjoyed the stinging clarity, the expedient way the paddle transmitted its message. "You’re a bad boy, aren’t you? You’re Daddy’s little pig," the man with…

  • Fire

    —for Bei Dao Lost, but for the flames we drag through dark streets; smoke and dust Aho je la, aho je la, aho jengeje, aho jengeje This chant is sky orotund with sun and the mirage: a pot smoldering against night’s face, startling last year’s spirits gathering in corners, holding on. And this—The crackle of…

  • Omens

    Syringes, ampoules, feathers, finger foods, driftwood, A purple sheen on the water, obscene eddies, mud on the banks     and pine nests. This morning I saw another omen: there’s always something,     usually just one thing, An egret or an ibis. But it’s the things in conjunction that make meaning. Five days ago there was…

  • The Last Time I Saw You

    I think the last time I saw you may have been that time near the church. I still like that church despite this, though the church is also other things to me. In fact, more and more I wish I remembered those other things that are called permanent, inviolable, impregnable to assault or trespass, secure…