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  • Blacks in the U.

    There is a new black woman in the English department. Several people told me about her, that she is extremely nice, and that she looks white-like me. The way they described her, I didn’t know what I’d see, though I think I thought to myself, Another “nice” light-skinned girl who knows how to make people…

  • The Brooch

    Some cruel entrepreneur glued jewels onto wings to prevent their broad, papery flowering, the ruby or sapphire or smoky opal hump wedged in an oval frame, its frail gold chain blunted with a pin, so the exotic beetle, living brooch, could plod its strict loop. Pinned to my mother’s monogrammed blouse, that insect circled her…

  • Contributors’ Notes

    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…

  • How I Got Born

    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…

  • Port Townsend

    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…

  • Introduction

    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…

  • My Heart

    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…

  • Forty Years

    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.

  • Bay of Naples

    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…