MASTHEAD Coordinating Editor for This Issue Gerald Stern Executive Director DeWitt Henry Managing Editor / Associate Fiction Editor Don Lee Associate Poetry Editor Joyce Peseroff Office Manager Jessica Dineen Founding Publisher Peter O'Malley Thanks this issue to: Kevin Supples; our poetry readers Christopher Wysocki, Rafael Campo, Tom Laughlin, Bill Keeney, Doina Iliescu, Janet Choi, Karen…
I've believed from the beginning, when I was just a kid writer, that part of the poet's task was to break the rules of language, to free it from the burdens of its history, thus acknowledging that history and revivifying it. It's some such sense that underpins the poem “These Days.” Cross from the Race…
You want me to know I'm keeping memories so you unlatch a few. The future's in there too but badly restrained like an actress so intently fastened on her cue: “pocketknife”—that she stumbles out on “doctor's wife” and has to be mistaken for the maid, then chased out so as not to interrupt the kiss….
This time, Death is rising, waving its big bird wing, anthracite plume, smoke and smudge of a twilit sky E. A. Poe would have delighted in. Along the river lights spread, bridges sway into brilliance, it's all so sudden, like coming out of anesthesia, gates opening, ascent and arrival, the elevator lifting suavely into consciousness….
Earlier in this century, literary magazines would occasionally publish "work-in-progress" issues to show interesting new work, often (as in a famous instance by Joyce) experimental, while it was still in the making. The main purpose — to put it another way — was to present relatively self-contained portions of longer works whose overall structure and…
The month is August, but the day is October, and under the overhang of this expensive house, the windsock's rainbow- colored tentacles dawdle like a cuttle- fish's in the bright, dry breeze. A boy I've never seen before, whose mother loves him too well for his sweet, uncomplicated face; the new, warm smell of his…
I run the comb through his lush hair. letting it think into my wrist the way the wrist whispers to the cards with punctuation and savvy in a game of solitaire. So much not to be said the scissors are saying in the hasp and sheer of the morning. Eleven years I've cut his hair…
When within the impenetrable green this morning is (thicket, wicker basket), the better to hear shade in shadow, twigs and stabs of light, I shut my eyes: the mockingbird sings in threes, like Dante, ninety-eight rhymes in seventeen cantos; rocks throne to throne, imbibing; wrings out each note, scrubbing on the old washboard, lets the…
‘The Excavation', ‘History’, and ‘Meurig Dafydd to His Mistress' are three poems from what I hope will be a continuing sequence of alternative monologues. That is to say, personae poems in which a different version of myth or history is adumbrated. As Euripides once stressed, Helen did not necessarily end up in Troy!. Absurd those…
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