The black uncombed wig with stiff grotesque braids sits atop his broad and pockmarked forehead; and his grip on the dull tomahawk is almost woman- like. Yes, Father Scarmark’s winsome eyes and slouched spine do not befit a proven warrior. But the beaded American flag designs on the bayonet scabbard symbolize breaths stolen from German…
1968: For you, sitting in a barracks in Okinawa, the war is over. You are quiet, as if experiencing silence for the first time. You don't know what to do. Stare at your hands. From the barracks sergeant you obtain the name of a place where you can be washed and massaged. You go there…
Because we suspect ourselves, knowing what we’re capable of, knowing how thin the veneer, wanting to control what gets away from us even now, with restraints wrists, ankles, our chastity belted down so we can save ourselves for and from. Because in our visions our best moments we all speak forbidden languages. Because if anyone…
1. There exists a future when green trees will be extinct. In our ingenuity artificial tree factories—A.T.F.’s— will flourish. Far ahead I see myself walking under one, and I grow uneasy at the thought of chunks of painted concrete swaying in the man-made breeze from bark-textured iron rods. Don’t worry, says the regional safety…
Down where it is dry and wild, across the border where the bad guys went when the sheriff was after them, there is a hilltop. On it live a man and a woman, both expatriates, who drink, give orders to Mexicans, pretend to work. Although they have a blue swimming pool and get all their…
Boys, men, girls, children, mothers, babies. You got to feed them. You always got to keep them fed. Winter summer. They always have to feel satisfied. Winter summer. But then you stop and ask: Where is the food going to come from? Because it’s never-ending, never-stopping. Where? Because your life is spent on feeding them…
Back in the days when life was easy and you could walk down the street at night and not worry about anybody knocking you over the head with some blunt object and taking all of your pocket change, Miss Mamie Jamison, the neighborhood kids’ godmother who gave us money and candy and let us hide…
MASTHEAD Guest Editors Marie Howe & Christopher Tilghman Executive Director DeWitt Henry Managing Editor & Fiction Editor Don Lee Poetry Editors David Daniel & Joyce Peseroff Editorial Assistant Barbara Tran Circulation Manager Maureen Armstrong Founding Publisher Peter O'Malley Staff Assistant: Barbara Lewis. Staff Intern: Maryn Wergland. Assistant Proofreader: Holly LeCraw Howe. Fiction Readers: Billie Lydia…
“Obscenity” is often not an expression by an individual uttered under great stress and condemned as bad taste, but one permitted and even prescribed by society. —E. E. Evans-Pritchard, British social anthropologist, 1925 Among the Ba-Ila (“among” as if swarming the petri dish of the British Imperialist), there exist expressions used collectively, that is, in…
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