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  • Poetry and Manners

    “Ages with a highly developed decorum find verse a relatively easy medium. Recent ages have clearly a low decorum and have run toward prose.” -R. P. Blackmur, 1951 Imagine what Blackmur would have said about our age, circa 1994. Toward what does an age run with almost no decorum? Toward self-indulgence and the collapse of…

  • Contributors’ Notes

    MASTHEAD Guest Editor Rosellen Brown Executive Director DeWitt Henry Managing Editor & Fiction Editor Don Lee Poetry Editor David Daniel Assistant Editor Jessica Dineen Editorial Assistant Jodee Stanley Founding Publisher Peter O’Malley Interns: Angela Pogany, Joanna Yas, Katherine Reed Ives, and Matt Jones. Poetry Readers: Renee Rooks, Bethany Daniel, Susan Rich, Tom Laughlin, Jason Rogers,…

  • Ohio

    We were excited at the motel when the B.B. King tour bus pulled in but then my mother said “Where did all these colored come from?” She’s eighty-five. That’s how it is in Ohio. No it’s not, that’s how it is in us, that’s why thirty-five years ago in my first year at Cornell we…

  • The Girlfriends

    Filled with old lovers, in the clutch of the chair, you are a bloom of uncombed hair. With a collection of roses, bowls of mashed petals, I make a clear cup of sky. Fold away clouds. Roll up blankets of blue. I am a body of empty husks. Indian corn is in your hair, the…

  • Tzimtzum: Contraction

    The contractions         Have come Too soon                You are sentenced         To bed    in the country house During the tedious hours Your sons scrap             Your husband courts An imaginary lover          You summon         the living Mothers:                Hagar                        Of the bitter smile                Sarah                        Whose laughter lies                Rebecca                        Who outwits men…

  • Like This

    The storm breaks leaving the limbs far away from being what happened, the world, like this. Wind still refuses to choose between the plumes of grasses and the roofs of the big houses. The agony of nails prying loose. The swing unhinged. The fleshy roots of an ash exposed like the paintings of Death embracing…

  • Perfidy

    A few sounds, over and again, grip me through this     drunken mess. I walk to the oblivious road, gone and done for. A few beats of my pulse splinter through the plates     of my skull. The gun blast, I do not know where the bullet hit or the depth of my wound. My…