Chicago, April 18, 1994 Had I been dreaming, I would have dreamt of being someone else, with a little creature burrowed in my body, clawing at the walls inside my chest-a recurring nightmare. But I was awake, listening to the mizzle in my pillow, to the furniture furtively sagging, to the house creaking under the…
Whether the language rebellion against phallogocentrism is really the deepest thing or whether it’s just a way of getting out of history i.e., race, class, and gender, so tiresome, so unavoidable; whether, that is, poetry, etc., no matter how weird, surreal, anti-referential, disruptive, etc., accepts things as they are when they need to be changed?…
Viejo San Juan, Puerto Rico, 1998 Here in a bar on the street of the saint en la calle San Sebastián, a dancer in white with a red red scarf en la calle San Sebastián, calls to the gods who were freed by slaves en la calle San Sebastián, and his bronze face is a…
Dimitri and I are half-naked when the woman shows up with the dogs. He is sitting up and I am astride him, my dress around my waist. What we had thought to be a secluded park looking out on an all-but-abandoned pond is actually someone’s backyard. “We’re clean-living people here,” the woman says. Then the…
Whenever she met someone, she secretly analyzed their handwriting. She wondered if these insights were illicitly gained, like wiretapping, but reasoned that graphology was merely close attention to the person without the distraction of interaction. Each element of the psyche had its equivalent mark on paper: the dominant upper zone of one friend indicated spirituality,…
There is nothing more than a painted room and I, a painted woman in it by an open window, a brass sun and a blob of flowers on a cabinet. Crowds come in every day to look at the bold brass color of the sun, the window quite unlike any other; the cabinet with flowers….
i. In the year that Johann Pike turned seventy he had been the Executive Director of the Chicago Antiquarian Society for over thirty years. His offices were housed, along with the rest of the Society, in Blackthorne Hall, which was located six blocks from the center of the University of Chicago, where Johann’s father had…
All summer and fall the couple floats hand in hand from work at the shelter workshop. Hand in hand in their secondhand sleeveless oxford shirts. With target tattoos on their deltoids. Even in the winter, the same way, hand in hand, although bundled up in secondhand wool coats. One snowy evening, right after they pass…
MASTHEAD Guest Editor Cornelius Eady 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 Editors: Jay Baron Nicorvo and Nicole Kelley. Editorial Assistants: Megan Weireter and Aja DeKleva Cohen. Poetry Readers: Simeon Berry,…
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