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  • Testament

    Almost winter and the groundskeepers are firing     blanks into the trees, scattering a nuisance of grackles from the branches—     Enough, say the guns, enough of all your excrement and birdsong, and the very sight is futility: great fistfuls     of black confetti, the way they soar out shrill with panic and return    …

  • About Stuart Dybek: A Profile

    Stuart Dybek works with a curious mix of spontaneity and retentiveness. He wrote most of the stories for his first collection, for instance, under a spell. He’d put on Eastern European classical music, and the words would simply pour out. To this day, Dybek relies on music for inspiration, listening to jazz, jotting in a…

  • Carol and Tommy

    Right in front of everyone at Two-Bit’s Worth, my last girlfriend called me unfit to drink in public, and I told her she was heavyset and that, after three months dating, I had come to realize she would always be heavyset. In this ugly way she walked out of my life for good. I was…

  • Between Words

    “The space we breathe is also called distance . . .”            —Linda Gregg   The trail to the ocean is steep. The grass we walk through, high and wet. I hear clear wind sighing through slender pine, silence between your words: that place your loneliness lives where I want to slip under, move unbroken as…

  • A Circle of Stones

    In 1967, when I was ten years old, my mother married Harlan Frame, and we moved that summer to a house he’d bought for us in Slaughter, Texas. Harlan was a farmer, a word my mother found too plain; she’d tell people Harlan ranched, though he kept fewer than a dozen cows on a patch…

  • Causae et Curae

    You preferred to reserve a table in the corner, and over the appetizers you may apologize, but first we must order the cook to harvest well, tuck away the sorry scattering of nostalgia under a wing or beneath a bone. No real specters this evening, as your plot spins out over the aromas and glances…