sole residue of written wisdom as actualized by things. Christ if the tulips shudder. Here the grass is rain-flattened and may not re-spring. What can one person say to another? The master is the master? The children are playing on the shore? To this language, the heron on the sandbar does not answer. Objects sought…
i. My wife, Rita, has been having these dreams in which relatives arbitrarily appear and either ask her to get inside something—a car, a slowly moving train, a brightly lit room that seems unattached to any larger structure—or implore her to let them enter a room or some other place, fixed or moveable (an elevator,…
In the first weeks, they wanted for nothing. This is how it always is— bountiful body, ravenous laws. They watched at the curb as the horse parade passed: colorful flags, fanfare, such clapping. They called to the elderly couple across the way, raising their pale hands each morning and evening, as to an old question….
I was once asked in an interview why cell phones don’t appear in my poems. This was followed up with a question about where I imagined the things that occur in my poems actually occur: "You know what I mean," said the interviewer, "things like deer and trees, birds and light . . ." I…
What if they could speak?: the pawn shop menorahs and samovars, the cherubs torn from their heavens, suspended forever in limbo, hanging by five black strings thickened in dust, their gold wings flaking so close to earth; the jewel- shaped chandeliers unmoored from ceilings; the salty waves in stasis on the black…
The glass shone cold with water fresh from somebody’s old “family spring” west of the Blue Ridge. I drank half in one continuous gulp—not greed, but because the day was hot. Then, out of breath or the telephone rang, I don’t remember— I stopped. I put the glass down to mist on the counter as…
MASTHEAD Guest Editor Carl Phillips Editor Don Lee Poetry Editor David Daniel Assistant Editor Gregg Rosenblum Associate Fiction Editor Maryanne O'Hara Associate Poetry Editor Susan Conley Founding Editor DeWitt Henry Founding Publisher Peter O'Malley Assistant Fiction Editor: Jay Baron Nicorvo. Editorial Assistants: Nada Bankovic and Chris Tonelli. Proofreader: Megan Weireter. Poetry Readers: Megan Weireter, Simeon…
1. The cherry tree bends not from its fruit but cold. Cold has more desire than tree or beholder to make a pleasing form. I have made a decision to stand under what shelter might be offered by the tree and let all tropical routine submerge under the actual sap that gilds fruit and dream…
Generous I may have been, amnesiac I became. Autumn fattened and thinned; I stared at the clock’s senseless hands. I let the girl in the market make change. I looked at my lists of medicines and the bottles on the shelf, but they seemed separate. In the bathroom mirror my face was suddenly antediluvian who…
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