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  • Something for the Trade

    Please note well, all you writers, editors, directors out there: when a phone call is terminated by the other person you do not, NOT, hear the buzz of a dial tone. You hear a faint click and then silence, absolute silence, the Great Silence, more eloquent than any electronic buzz could ever be. In fact…

  • Flamingo

    Libby killed herself just before the holidays, and so the flamingo stayed where it had been hidden-in the rotten shed at the edge of our yard. I’d often sneak out to look at it. The flamingo seemed incredibly big, its wooden neck reaching up past the shelves of potting soil and garden shears. It stood…

  • March 30

    Eighty-one degrees a record high for the day which is not my birthday but will do until the eleventh of June comes around and I know what I want: a wide-brimmed Panama hat with a tan hatband, a walk in the park and to share a shower with a zaftig beauty who lost her Bronx…

  • Reflection

    When I edited my issue so many years ago, featuring Amherst poets, I knew I wanted to have Saint Emily preside over our doings. So I got Jerry Liebling, then teaching at Hampshire, and a very distinguished photographer with many awards and shows at places like the Guggenheim in New York, to agree to take…

  • My Fathers, The Baltic

    Along the strand stones, busted shells, wood scraps, bottle tops, dimpled and stainless beer cans. Something began here a century ago, a nameless disaster, perhaps a voyage to the lost continent where I was born. Now the cold winds of March dimple the gray, incoming waves. I kneel on the wet earth looking for a…

  • Contributors’ Notes

    MASTHEAD Guest Editor Heather McHugh 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: Thomas Fabian and Michele Stella. Poetry Readers: Sean Singer, Ellen…

  • Okay, Let’s Not Have Sex

    And who could play it well enough If deaf and dumb and blind with love? —Yeats Let’s not pretend we could be less complicated than millions before us. Let’s be just friends, be Platonic, only look at the bottoms of each other’s feet, or skin on inner forearms, where the sun has done almost no…