an ordinary woman leaves her body here when she’s done with it a litterbug she leaves a burden and a warning to us but the dancer’s body is completely gone aah! a jitterbug her soul remains here with us an encouragement what are we supposed to do with it
I am not— opened or closed— what you expected, o heart. Or would you without me have thought to throw open the flooding and roar, to step through the lion’s gold pelt? have thought that the passionate glass is the body? and this life, the one life you wanted? Wanted, meaning neither lacked, nor desired,…
He thinks about the water often: sitting in traffic; in a chair in his office; in bed with his wife, Jeanette, who is now asleep. Together they live the life of the city, Phoenix, where the smog blisters the horizon and the swimming pools are treated by experts. Byron, his brother-in-law, runs a pool cleaning…
I like thinking of the painting chosen for the cover of this issue as a visual representation of our theme of Borderlands. The artist, A. Artidor, is Haitian, contemporary, and not very well-known. My co-editor and I came across it in a Haitian art gallery on the island of Guadeloupe. It is a small (16"…
My father loved her, or rather, wanted her. Gaudy and baubled, with long nut-brown legs, and sun-blazed hair; yes, he wanted her, bad, and the bitch knew it. She was twenty-five, he was fifty-two, I was eleven, mother was dead. The night it happened she was drunk, dinner was over, the dishes were catching flies,…
As if the porous bag had been dipped once, twice, once more in the summer’s water, then set aside. Halfway between sleep and waking, I took it between my lips. And though the earth is everywhere terrible and cruel, the heart diamond flashed out once, twice, and once again the semaphore-reply it cannot help but…
This is my tale about the Vietnam War; at least I think it qualifies. This story, however, comes no nearer to Phnom Penh than 10,000 miles: blame this lack of action on my year of birth-1954-and blame it on my gender. A muddy river does appear later on in this story, and you’ll see a…
1. Everything we ate was on foot. We didn’t have the Norge or the Frigidaire, only salt to keep. Autumn’s hog went in brine for days, swimming. You had to boil forever just to get the taste out. I loved winter & its chitlins, but boy I hated cleaning. If not from the hogs, we…
There is a fish that stitches the inner water and the outer water together. Bastes them with its gold body’s flowing. A heavy thread follows that transparent river, secures it— the broad world we make daily, daily give ourselves to. Neither imagined nor unimagined, neither winged nor finned, we walk the luminous seam. Knot it….
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