MASTHEAD Guest Editor Mary Gordon Editor Don Lee Poetry Editor David Daniel Assistant Editor Susan Conley Assistant Fiction Editor Maryanne O'Hara Founding Editor DeWitt Henry Founding Publisher Peter O'Malley Editorial Assistants: Thomas McNeely, Jessica Olin, Debra DeFord, and Tom Herd. Fiction Readers: Heidi Pitlor, Billie Lydia Porter, Emily Doherty, Michael Rainho, Leah Stewart, Tammy Zambo,…
What would be strange in someone else’s bed, familiar here as the body’s jolt at the edge of sleep—body persistent, solitary, precarious. I watch his right hand float in our bedroom’s midnight, inscribe forms by instinct on the air, arterial, calligraphic figures I’m too literal to follow. I close my book quietly, leave a woman…
She draws. She draws a door. On the windowpane in breath. Breathes on the glass and draws. A door, an O spells polio. Six years old. She dreams. Walks with her father again. River of glass. To the river of glass collecting bits of this and that to examine later under the microscope. To hold….
"I like songs I can relate to,” Ray Charles said in an interview in 1960, long before “relate” became part of the ubiquitous psychobabble. And I guess that was Jane Shore’s and my one persistent criterion for the work we’ve included in the following pages. In some fundamental, surprising, persistent way, the poems and stories…
pacing the ancient earthworks, the fortifications of silence, I know I am not through with you, I will never be through, and not one of us who leap from stone to stone on the road of boulders that leads to the old lighthouse, not one of us who clamber the grassy slope to the lookout…
How many times since Elise’s death had her husband, Mitch, said numbly, Oh Christ, I can’t believe she’s gone, I don’t know what to do. And Joan replied helplessly, squeezing his hand, I know! I know. Of course, there wouldn’t be one-a wake. The deceased hadn’t been Catholic. Hadn’t been brought up in any church,…
The Greeks said: never to be born is best; next best, to die young in a noble cause. “Où sont les neiges d’antan?” Villon asked. “Where are yesteryear’s snows?” is, I guess, the phrase in English. Villon spoke in praise of women not born when the Greeks said: “Best not to exist at all.” Yet…
Mrs. Rabinowitz is sitting on the beach with her little grandson, who is playing in the sand with a pail and shovel when a great tidal wave suddenly appears and sweeps him out to sea. Mrs. Rabinowitz (shaking her fist at the sky): God, bring him back! Bring that little boy right…
apprenticeship The difference is always road and you can measure it with rocks or spiders. The street signs are blue, the poor lie naked in the parks. The work of fire never ends and angels build cities of grass. Someone will follow a bird to a forest where child twins are slain. No king…
No products in the cart.