San Antonio, Texas, 1990 In the Crockett Hotel dining room, a chalk-faced man in medalled uniform growls a prayer at the head of the veterans' table. Throughout the map of this saint-hungry city, hands strain for the touch of shrines, genuflection before cannon and memorial plaque, grasping the talisman of Bowie knife replica at the…
In the cultural shake-up of the last decade, it has become increasingly popular to attack both the academy and poetry. The assaults on the university have come from both sides of the aisle: new ethnic and group definitions have led to strong progressive critiques of what were taken to be standard curricula and established canons….
Phantom of the Opera and Frankenstein, The Hunchback of Notre Dame and The Last Man on Earth—at fourteen, I could have been the last for all they cared, still no luck with girls—and so spent each Saturday afternoon at the Towne with blacks and whites I had fallen in love with, at home with the…
By the time we first met, you were the big-hearted poet, big in every way, breast and head, wrists and calves, but largest in the heart. And deep in the eye, grey like your hair, unlike those areas through which you moved as if on glass, unyielding in your big, gentle way, no longer that…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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