God works in mysterious ways, Father said, but He’s not half as mysterious as your mother. He said, Let there be light. And there was light. I don’t see anything mysterious about that. He did what He said He’d do. Your mother says, Let’s not be late for the movie. Yet she takes so long…
Jorie Graham is the kind of poet whose life is nothing less than cinematic. She was born in Rome in 1950 and grew up there. Her father, Bill Pepper, was the head of the Newsweek Rome bureau; her mother, Beverly, is a sculptor famous for her totemic structures. As a child, Jorie hid inside old…
He’s on top of her, barely moving, at the swimming hole I’ve called mine for years. Here, to be anything but naked is nearly sacrilegious. In the quick red canyon water sears the dusty plain. My daughter plays, oblivious to them, delicious in her two-year skin, but I can’t not look (and must if I’m…
In a deep socket of an empty acre lot in South Jersey, a wiry boy with dark eyebrows, burnished blond hair, and thick lenses in his glasses is clearing pathways through the milkweeds, trying to preserve as many of the leafy, muscular stalks as he can. He’s working harder than he’s worked in weeks, so…
“Packs well,” she says, forming in ungloved hands snowballs, lopsided, roughly made, and calls her big-boned shepherd and my scruffy mutt to catch each high underhanded toss. They make us laugh as they leap to mouth midair those cold nothings. A chew, swallow, or spit and, ready for the next gift, they sit to watch…
MASTHEAD Guest Editor Jorie Graham Editor Don Lee Managing Editor Gregg Rosenblum Poetry Editor David Daniel 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 Alexis Washam. Poetry Readers: Scott Withiam, Sean…
One unexceptional bright afternoon in August, coming from the rose garden secreted behind the rue Villehardouin, I thought, fleet, furtive, If I lived alone I could stay here and pushed the thought away as firmly and unlikely as Might rain later because I wanted just to choose and I had chosen, more than cobblestones…
Something’s kept me away, perhaps an all-too-familiar voice laced with paranoia streaming through a phone unhooked from its cradle, dangling in that empty room. Hanging up not an option. Her ashes in an urn for the third straight year and now I wonder how it was I never could get through to her. Yet here…
I imagine he’s sitting nearby like a Sufi on a roof, hollow-eyed, intense, burning at midnight. Something snaps. He has learned the art of breaking, & being broken. His call is naked as a needle, sharp as images he sorts from afterimages, arranging them like flames. In the pines he…
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