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  • After Estrangement

    You should know the kind of morning it is— one gods have argued over for years. But I've decided I'm under a Byzantine curse out of which endings situate themselves like deep forests. The players are strewn in the empty heart of a house. She's called up her lost cat who kept her comfortable when…

  • Black Wasp

    It buzzes over my head and enters the wood near the roof. I paint the wooden deck with red and move out of the way, drops of paint like blood after its wings, like a trace of what I knew when it first stung me, years ago, made me dance like the thief of murals,…

  • Trickery

    Sometime in the early 1880s a medical doctor named Israel Wood Powell, superintendent for Indian Affairs for Coastal Indians in British Columbia, collected a raven rattle from the Tshimshian Indians. He sent the rattle to The American Museum of Natural History in New York City, where it remains. It is a percussive musical instrument, used…

  • Memories End

    Your television flickers. You're alone, your wife on a week-long visit to friends, so you watch the late news. Tonight is entirely about the Berlin Wall: the Germanies reunite, laughing and weeping Germans chip away at the Wall itself. One has a carpenter's hammer, another a sledge, another a crowbar. The sight pleases you; the…

  • Hairy Men

    The first time Sam ever left her children behind to go away by herself, they were two and five. It was a long time ago. She went to a hot springs resort, where she met a very hairy man. Because the man had been there before, and Sam had not, he offered to take her…

  • Contributors’ Notes

    MASTHEAD Guest Editor Alberto Alvaro Rios Executive Director DeWitt Henry Managing Editor Don Lee Associate Poetry Editor Joyce Peseroff Assistant Fiction Editors Don Lee and Debra Spark Office Manager Renee Rooks Production Assistant Mariette Lippo Founding Publisher Peter O'Malley Staff Assistant: Julie Trevelyan. Typesetting: Gian Lombardo and InText Publishing Services. Fiction Readers: Billie Lydia Porter,…

  • Eighty Acres

    It was just me and my brother Paul at the coops when Hondo come home with his new truck, ready to kill. He'd been down at Rose's, drinking hard, and as he lurched across the lawn I stepped out in front of him like a fool. You see, me and Paul, we're looking out for…

  • The House of Cleopatra

    It was one hundred and seven that June day. The swamp cooler on the roof had lowered the temperature down to the high nineties, and the walls and furniture were damp to the touch. I felt clammy and restless but there was nowhere to go except to the shopping center. My husband had flown to…