Article

Portraits

It's not the chapel bell at Arles, only a doorbell rung on television, but it's enough to send the dog in a scurry and yapping to the front door where no one is. I'm not Gauguin, at least not now, the isle of Tahiti has disappeared into the ether of possibility, and the girls, too….

Goodwill

There's no way of knowing what a woman owns until she's dead. Until it's time to clean out her closets and drawers to make room for something else, there's no way of knowing what she needed, and wanted, to hide. "I've been thinking," my sixty-three-year-old father said, "that it's time to go through your mother's…

Big Red Fish

I have to sympathize with the child. The mother has changed clothes twice, nothing seems right tonight, nothing fits, not even the moon between those two trees, it's simply too big, too fat, too angry to stay put. The other woman has skinny legs and a face like rain. So I have to sympathize with…

Tomorrow, Today

Coming into the home stretch—but what’s home? A couple of years before he died, Ray got stung by a bee and his heart nearly stopped. Previous stings hadn’t bothered him. Now he became allergic to gluten, milk, fruit. He broke out at a look, had problems breathing. Women get menopause. Men pause, then fall. Another…

Contributors’ Notes

MASTHEAD Directors DeWitt Henry Peter O'Malley Coordinating Editor for This Issue Maura Stanton Managing Editor / Associate Fiction Editor Don Lee Office Manager David Daniel Associate Poetry Editor Jennifer Rose Editorial Assistant Elizabeth Detwiler Typesetting Barbara Levy and INPRINT Thanks this issue to: Our interns Sarah Baker and Christopher Wysocki, and our readers Rafael Campo,…

Havana Birth

Off Havana the ocean is green this morning of my birth. The conchers clean their knives on leather straps and watch the sky while three couples who have been dancing on the deck of a ship in the harbor, the old harbor of the fifties, kiss each other's cheeks and call it a night. On…

Lost Constellations

I blow on the fire to help it find its wood. The corners of the room are askew. The files have knuckles hard as teak. They bang out sentences on the insides of lampshades, as if it were a party game. A skull sits on its occiput by the window, looking up among glass fused…

The Viewer

And a feature about the only son of the famous “Angel of Death,” the man who experimented at Auschwitz on all those dwarfs and twins. I fold the section once in half and then in half again, as if to narrow focus, but glimpse instead a lizard as it shoots up the steps outside then…