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  • The Chair

    The chair. The ice. The day in December when the chair was useful. Its broken seat. That, too, was what I offered up to you, but to what use. The light filled the curtains, the curtains conducted it into the room where they were talking, one standing near the chair, one smoking by the door….

  • Dear Rome

    Sometimes I touch the cleaner. Sometimes an hourly vole shares the bed and wife with me. Once I sat up suddenly and spoke it: crowned platelets inherit the passenger bin. I believe the precise moment of Rapture is felt not to occur, the Rind of Incidence I made up in the first place. On a…

  • Apology

    Lately, too much disturbed, you stay breathing in me and I believe you. How could I not feel you were misspent, there by books stacked clean on glass, or outside the snow arriving as I am still arriving. If the explanations amount to something, I will tell you. It is enough, you say, that surfaces…

  • Introduction to Disease

    Call me Responsible.                                    (Like all of them                                    it loves an exam.) Pleased to meetcha. A charming living space.                                    Thank you.                                    All original, naturally. Tongue?                      Not telling. (Funny little factory.)                                    I know my diagnosis.                                    Friendlier than the world.                                    Friendlier than the world. Well do yourself a favor they say…

  • Headset

    The sun gives us our genesis, he said, but is not itself the genesis     of our being. Connected. Yet portable, I countered, sauntering down the carpeted hallway     speaking seductively into. My floating microphone. Much like the current rash of pop-     show singers, who may dance. As if possessed by demons while lip-synching,…

  • Two Women

                        1. There goes a difference between his mother’s death in the shallow woods by shots or hacking late autumn/winter and tufted oak leaves framing her and His mother’s death of disease in the windless cube and pinned to the line bed stand cluttered with spectral elixirs and the carefree agents of interiority tapping on…

  • Habitat

    Hampered sky, unworldly, cleaving a stranger from me and placing her at my earpiece, and further— what goods move inside her? She wears a theatrical scent like a language, a musk, and she does not wear well. She wears unwell. On the furthest mound, the one cresting above the pond-formation, smitten with wings and throat-calls,…

  • Milk of Human Kindness

    Tastes like the melted centers of toasted marshmallows. Tastes like tears of nectar squeezed out of clover blossoms. Tastes like sips from rivers running through lands of milk and honey. Remember those wax bottles filled with colored liquids, how as a child you bit off the top and sucked out the sweet purple, or red,…

  • Contributors’ Notes

    MASTHEAD Guest Editor Charles Baxter 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: Bess Newman and Patricia Reed. Fiction Readers: Eson Kim, Wendy…