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  • Packs Well

    “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…

  • Contributors’ Notes

    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…

  • Days of 1999

    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…

  • Visiting My Mother’s Grave

    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…

  • The Owl

        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…

  • Billy Strayhorn Writes Lush Life

    Empty ice-cream carton in a kitchen garbage can. Up all night with your mother. He beat her again. Up all night eating ice cream, you made your mother laugh.                      ly Life   is lone Duke’s hands on your shoulders, you play it again. Cancer eats moth holes through you and you and you.                      ly…

  • The Closet

    Whether in chrome surgery or gymnasium toilet— everyone is expelled bloody and bleating, tube attached from mass to mass, the slick itself turning vivid. Whether there or in this floor-through, Mother, I have missed you terribly— miss you, though I know about mothering myself. * This afternoon Madeline Carmichael, 61, was convicted of fatally beating…

  • Matins

    At last she decided to speak to the moon. Having no other choice, she begged it to set her free. Why me, she asked, when others are content to sit on their haunches all night peering at your sullen face; or feel your granite pull beneath skin and obey, opening wave upon wave. When no…

  • Run Away, My Pale Love

    This was just before my thirtieth birthday. I was in graduate school, of all places. I had no idea why. None of us did. We were extremely well-spoken rubber duckies. You could push us in any one direction, and we would flounder on forever. Sometimes, in the drowsy winter hallways, my conscience would rear up…