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  • Contributors’ Notes

    MASTHEAD Coordinating Editor for This Issue Carolyn Forché Executive Director DeWitt Henry Managing Editor / Associate Fiction Editor Don Lee Associate Poetry Editor Joyce Peseroff Assistant Fiction Editors Don Lee and Debra Spark Office Manager Renee Rooks Founding Publisher Peter O'Malley Staff Assistant: Jacqueline Fulmer. Editorial Intern: Stephen Burt. Typesetting: Gian Lombardo and InText Publishing…

  • Blood of the Lamb

    The Bighorns float above the haze to the west of our ranch like marble palaces in a fairy tale. Until the woman came, we'd never been up in those mountains. My father kept us to work day after day, or else there was school, and, until the woman, he'd said he couldn't leave the ranch…

  • The Name

    Casting for blues my treble hook, troubled, as I think of it, acquired only seaweed. The junk fish swirled counterclockwise beneath the tiny pier chased into the air by blues in a feeding frenzy, pressing up from the shallow bottom, driving the school of mutt fish crazy with the herd impulse of natural participation. The…

  • Introduction: West Real

    The West is a big place, but not my West. The West for me is where I lived — it is a house. And it's how I lived, and who I lived with. It's some people, and some streets, a border fence with Mexico in the distance, an arroyo across the highway, a dry landscape,…

  • Lies

    There are certain lies I need to tell you. I hope that they are successful. Not that the lies are successful, but what I am saying behind the lies will be. There are certain things I want you to know about me. Not that I am good and kind, I am those things and I…

  • Five Poems

    The sound was not unlike a drum. My chest was full of air, my back was skin over bones, hollow, like a drum. It didn’t hurt when my sister hit me, just went “thud” and I laughed. I make you look stupid. I watch you rage. This tiny bit of me can only smile; now…

  • Jerry

    There's a bird beyond the copper beech      That says jerry, right through the middle of the day,            Harshly. These are days                  Without itinerary, nothing to cross off                  A list, nothing to accomplish but the hours            Through these dog days, the lowly pre-      Autumnal days where only meditation Quiets the…

  • Why I Left the Church

    Maybe it was because the only time I hit a baseball it smashed the neon cross on the church across the street. Even twenty-five years later when I saw Father Harris I would wonder if he knew it was me. Maybe it was the demon-stoked rotisseries of purgatory where we would roast hundreds of years…

  • Still Life

    And there was my mother, toward the end she wore only a man's pajama top and a diaper. And one morning I went to her, because it was my turn, and I leaned over her bed, which now had a rail, and I prayed, “Please, please don't let me hurt her.” And I started to…