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  • Contributors’ Notes

    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…

  • Beholder

    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…

  • Apiary VII

    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…

  • The Party

    There were a bunch of us who had drawn together into a corner of the dining room. It was a big party, and none of us had met before. But a tiny core of women of a certain age had drawn more women until there were enough of us that we needed to be democratic…

  • The Factory

    For a while I was dropped but I’m back on the assembly line. My boss is the Muse, who cites me for laziness and other offenses. I confess I try on the words in the back room sometimes, do a jig in front of the mirror, and cringe at the difference between what I am…

  • The Bad Shepherd

    The shepherd is perched on a stile, one eye on his paper, one eye on the lane below the ffridd, the meadow, beyond the flock. His dogs lie at his feet, their heads between their paws, panting softly in the unseasonably warm May weather and batting their ears occasionally at the horseflies attracted to the…

  • Pain Thinks of Alcibiades

    Pain thinks of the sea the blackened fields the shore without daylight Pain thinks of the hour’s fires without witness the horses breaking & the sea breaking Pain thinks of the fields the tide rising in light’s black zone without body or breath Pain thinks of the sea without witness Pain thinks of Alcibiades

  • Mouse’s Nest

    after John Clare All dark, and my feet against          the feed-room floor                   scuff cement, find their way          to the light, the switch, which flares on          with a snap of bird-                   wings’ nimble shuffle          and flight, the rafters blowing off feathers,          then my hands against                   the grain bin’s…