What hazed around the branches late in March was white at first, as if a young tree's ghost were blazing in the woods, a fluttering around the limbs like shredded sleeves. A week later, green fountaining, frothing champagne; against the dark of evergreen, that skyrocket shimmer. I think this is how our…
for Ann Elliott The day you gave birth a man who'd had a nervous breakdown five years earlier was showing me his cellar: around us garlic tresses hissed, groomed and crisp, holding their cargo inward, as you and I traveled through years, countries and lovers, exotic lives looking for real love or what would make…
Eight hours on my feet at Joe's Pizzeria and I know inside this on-again, off-again red pulse of an arrow pointing toward the tunnel my whole body wants to become. Joe slams down the grate and we're gone, out on the street where the neon craving of a train shudders into darkness beside the art…
MASTHEAD Coordinating Editors for This Issue Rita Dove Fred Viebahn Executive Director DeWitt Henry Managing Editor / Associate Fiction Editor Don Lee Associate Poetry Editor Joyce Peseroff Assistant Editor David Daniel Founding Publisher Peter O'Malley Thanks this issue to: Colleen Westbrook; our interns Greg Beato, Jane Blevin and Stephen Burns; and our readers Sara Nielsen…
A topaz stare, the art of self-seduction. . . She looks without resentment at the face The mirror offers her, applying blush To fill the contours with a candy red. His dancing tremors through the cabinet, Shaking her gaze with patience. “Do me next!” He tells her in a voice less rude than brash: She…
What the Earth Knows 1922, a summer noon when I was twelve, I stood above a pasture watching red ants crawl up from beneath the ground nearby, each one carrying a bead, a colored bead, so that the line of ants became a necklace moving past my feet. I knelt and dug then, knelt and…
For the fountain of water flows ever with the water of the spirit, having the one and only Fish, taken with the hook of divinity, which feeds the whole world, as if dwelling in the sea, with its own flesh. —Narratio rerum quae in Perside acciderunt The first wild flowers on Suicide Hill were birdfoot…
When I see the old man again down in the underworld this morning, he and his son— how well they get on together, grinning and talking easily among the bundled packages— I feel as if I've ripped open some ancient buried layer of my past; not my own, my blood's. It's 8:45. They've been there…
for Quincy Trouppe, Sr. father, it was an honor to be there, in the dugout with you, the glory of great black men swinging their lives as bats, at tiny white balls burning in at unbelievable speeds, riding up & in & out a curve breaking down wicked, like a ball falling off a table…
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