“Si la uva está hecha de vino, quizá nosotros somos las palabras que cuentan lo que somos.” —Eduardo Galeano, El libro de los abrazos for Jane Miller It’s the mind that marshals everything into neat sequence in retrospect—subject, verb, predicate—fooling us into believing words don’t dig their tangled roots in us. But rooting around we…
How do you begin to judge your father? The Coast Guard and the insurance company investigators would list my father as blameless in the boating death of Lamar Locklear, our next-door neighbor and my father’s business partner. The boat-a sportsfisher-was christened the Nell, a name my divorced parents had chosen for me had I been…
1. Sensitive Dependence on Initial Conditions For want of a nail the shoe was lost, for want of a shoe the horse was lost, and so on to the ultimate loss—a battle, a world. In other words, the breeze from this butterfly’s golden wings could fan a tsunami in Indonesia or send a small chill…
Zacharis Award Ploughshares and Emerson College are proud to announce that Debra Spark has been named the 1995 recipient of the John C. Zacharis First Book Award for her novel, Coconuts for the Saint. The $1,500 award — which is funded by Emerson College and named after the college’s former president — honors the best…
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…
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…
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…
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