Yolanda Barnes comes from California. She majored in journalism and graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Southern California. While she was a student she wrote for the Black student newspaper, Alluswe, and freelanced for the Los Angeles Times. After graduating, she worked at the Hartford Courant. (An outstanding athlete, she also taught, for…
Deborah Joy Corey's narrators take control as soon as they get behind the wheel of her stories. They pull you into their pickup trucks, or vintage white Cadillacs, or baby blue DeSotos and slam the door. And there you are looking at their world through cracked and dusty windshields, living their lives, drivin' the Vitamin…
I • THE VAST SLEEP OF THINGS 1 Carthage Is Burning If only this sleep could be wind, I told myself, a dark stirring of it out of Egypt, the wind which rots all sails and cannot rot and is beyond age-not the scirocco with its one obsession; not the chinook thawing the ice on…
I am laying my hands on the sleeping child, on this thin flesh over the winged scapula, pressing—just so—as bread is pressed. For this is the bread that falls and rises and these are the shoulder blades that cut to the nervous bone of love. But I want to press harder, tougher like a wrestler…
That was the summer I used the Duino Elegies in all of my seductions, taking Rilke from my briefcase the way another man might break out candlelight and wine. I think Rilke would have understood, would have thought the means justified the ends, when I began to read in a voice so low it forced…
Out of the old noon sun still lifting wraiths from morning's gully, the phoebe's call assails the barn— its shingles are nearer the heart of gray in the shadows of those deep eaves. Summer, the huckster, wends over Blinn's Hill, having sold snippets of blue thread, a needle, some ribbon, perhaps a pan…
Yellow fingers lift a match to Virginia's shreds and edges: Deeply I pull smoke in, and blood faints at the door. My young father coughs, gags, and wipes his lips with pale narrow fingers: When he looks at his shaking hands, splaying them out to gaze at them, I understand how much his nails please…
Charles and I go out together in his boat, which is a cat- amaran, in the burnishing weather, elated. so it's not surprising that in his boat, which is a cat at top speed among cats, this poem begins. Elated. so it's not surprising that we sing “Speed Bonnie Boat” to the winds. At top…
but you sent me back to Turkey, and the town was Canakkale, or was it Kusadasi, no, Canakkale with my first sight of a Turkish street, of Turkish women wrapped to their eyes, and on the streets (I was high on a bus on the way to Troy) were all those small “cathedrals,” carried by…
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