Article

  • Being There

    Kennedy Playground Washington, D.C. We forced our faces into the circular frame a stringless hoop made, hoping more than silence & light would fall through. We fought for position. We fouled & shoved. We high-fived God. Our Converse All-Stars burned enough rubber to rival The Devil & his mama. Hoop, horseshoe, noose. We aimed at…

  • Imago

    When we ran out of money, the paintings worked like magic. My father would take one down from the pair of nails it hung on and would carry it-his face close to the portrait's face-to his creditor's car. He told the few facts he had been told about the artist's life, a name changed from…

  • About Tobias Wolff: A Profile

    Tobias Wolff was born in Alabama in 1945 and grew up in the Pacific Northwest. He is the author of the short novel The Barracks Thief, which won the 1985 PEN/Faulkner Award; two collections of short stories, Back in the World and In the Garden of the North American Martyrs, which received the Saint Lawrence…

  • What I Want

    your open legs a tree where I leave messages like a failed monk with new prayers waiting it out in the small clearing to stay in wilderness without trembling to lean into a covenant of branches no one can redeem the part of lying awake near your offered wrist yet I might split you with…

  • Slow Fade to Black

    for Thomas Cripps Like a clothesline of whites colored hands couldn't reach, a thousand souls crossed promised air, & the screen glowed like something we were supposed to respect & fear. Daylight & Sunday were outside, waiting to segregate darkness with prejudices of their own. A silhouette behind a flashlight led us down an aisle…

  • College Car

    At twenty, John Berryman raised a fountain pen and wrote, Lear walked his patience by the sea And learned nothing. At the same age, Under the Fresno sun, I was saying to myself, I could get fifty bucks for my Rambler. The car had killed three stripeless cats And splattered a continent of butterflies. I…

  • October, Yellowstone Park

    How happy the animals seem just now, all reading the sweetgrass text, heads down in the great yellow-green sea of the high plains— antelope, bison, the bull elk and his cows moving commingled in little clumps, the bull elk bugling from time to time his rusty screech but not yet in rut, the females not…