MASTHEAD Guest Editors Tim O'Brien and Mark Strand Editor Don Lee Poetry Editor David Daniel Assistant Editor Jodee Stanley Founding Editor DeWitt Henry Founding Publisher Peter O'Malley Editorial Assistant: Maryanne O'Hara. Interns: Heidi Pitlor, Julie Wolf, and Todd Cooper. Fiction Readers: Billie Lydia Porter, Michael Rainho, Robin Troy, Stephanie Booth, Loretta Chen, Barbara Lewis, Will…
The speaker is the young black man Susan Smith claimed kidnapped her children. Though it’s common belief That Susan Smith willed me alive At the moment Her babies sank into the lake When called, I come. My job is to get things done. I am piecemeal. I make my living by taking…
A year after your death, I leaned above My desk, and listened to gullshrieks rising off The shoreline I imagined—shapes of driftwood, Glistening sacs of jellyfish, whatever Washes in—page after page of days Misplaced in the leaden interim . . . One evening, I felt it before I saw the seam, the tremor Widen—felt…
It’s been a great joy for me to work as an editor again, to have the privilege of sampling the range and richness of contemporary writing at its sources, and of compiling some of that writing in what’s essentially a book, created as much by its internal juxtapositions as by individual pieces’ indelible strengths. Prose…
The speaker is the young black man Susan Smith claimed kidnapped her children. Susan Smith has invented me because Nobody else in town will do what She needs me to do. I mean: jump in an idling car And drive off with two sad and Frightened kids in the back. Like a bad…
Work boots in the basement thrown against a wall. The garden dies in the mind— nasturtiums entwined on a chain-link fence. The gods he carried nothing but dried crusts. That vintage bottle on the table crushed more each time he hammers it.
The city is still the same handful of glances, Glimpses of alleyways like wounds laid open, Balconies of laundry drying, names of streets Unfolding in the smells of fishscale, kelp, And poverty . . . Across Fleet Landing, sheets Of blind-white glare seethe off the spires and stairflights Through me, through my sea-pitched, sea-numb…
When my grandfather turned ninety we had a party in a restaurant in Harlem called Copeland’s. Harlem restaurants are always dim to dark and this was no exception. Daddy would have gone downtown but Baba, as we called him, wanted to stay in the neighborhood, and this place was “swanky.” We picked him up in…
The speaker is the young black man Susan Smith claimed kidnapped her children. Who are you, mister? One of the boys asks From the eternal back seat, And here is the one good thing: If I am alive, then so, briefly are they, Two boys returned, three and one, Quiet and scared, bunched…
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