The six stories in this issue speak for themselves — forcefully, lucidly — and whatever I might say about them is irrelevant to their value as literature. The very notion of an “introduction,” at least in this context, strikes me as peculiar to the brink of weird. A good story introduces itself, stakes its own…
A bird comes to the window. It’s a mistake to think of them as birds, they are so often messengers. That is why, once they plummet to the sill, they sit so perfectly still, to mock patience, lifting their heads to sing poor lady, poor lady, their three-note warning, later flying like a dark cloud…
Drought summer I broke my foot and hobbled on crutches. Stood staring, crutches against the counter, refrigerator door open, blank light spilling. Your mother, all hours, weeping upstairs, her widow’s heart splitting her chest apart. Home after nine, or later, vacant as a ghost, you would swallow me with a hot mouth, grime visible on…
One spring night, at the end of my street God was lying in wait. A friend and I were sitting in his new sedan like a couple of cops on surveillance, shooting the breeze to pass the time, chatting up the daydreams, the raw deals, all the woulda-coulda-shoulda’s, the latest “Can you believe that?” As…
Gerald Stern: Odd Mercy (W.W. Norton, July 1995), a new book of poetry, including a 56-page poem called “Hot Dog” about a street woman in New York’s East Village.
Daniel was already home. “Hi,” he yelled from the kitchen as Em wrestled her overcoat onto a hanger in the overfull front closet. What the hell was he doing? Breaking rocks on the counter? “Hi,” she yelled back, unwinding her scarf. “Annie call?” Wham. Wham. Wham. “No,” Daniel called back. Wham. “What are you doing?”…
The girl in a blue dress is standing on pink tile and gazing back at the artist as if looking through him for a place to rest. The day is brilliant with Mediterranean light Modigliani fled for the gravity of dark hotels, human throats elongated like sunflowers on the back streets of Paris, barefoot girls—this…
Contributor Spotlight Tim Seibles is a commanding, dynamic presence, particularly when he reads his poetry. Tall, charismatic, he stands behind the podium and gives animated voice to poems that are, at turns, grave, inventive, and hilarious. His primary subjects from the start have been sexuality and race, and somehow, Seibles has always been able to…
On the day before his fiftieth birthday, Bill Lander received a letter from a woman he had never heard of-Amber Harding-saying she’d be pleased to come to Wallace to meet him and be his birthday date. She noted the time she’d arrive on the train and said she’d have no trouble recognizing him. “I’ll just…
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