FIRE One girl among us set herself on fire. She used gasoline. She was too young to drive at the time. I wondered how she'd gotten hold of it. Had she walked to her neighborhood garage and told them her father's car had run out of gas? I couldn't look at her without thinking about…
Behind Church Ebenezer, moral box, the steep red washed-out slope grew scrubby pines. Some pennyroyal stank invitingly, and vines transgressed the narrow tracks. It wouldn't be right to go back now— was hardly right to go. . . . Ten-year-old Lou squatting, hesitating, blocked by the grave spirit of big Dr. Marr, the egg-on-legs…
They walk into the air at dawn. The man and woman trying to birth the baby. Along the stretch to the lying-in hospital she summons cows she has seen—docile, steadfast in the way sea is always pregnant and ready to give and destroy at the same time. Patience covers her like a shield against women…
White cottonwood tufts fill the air like moths; we rub our eyes in the filmy atmosphere thick with white dreams, while down the road at the Sagebrush Inn, a Seeing Eye dog sleeps beneath the piano where his mistress practices Linda Ronstadt's greatest hits. Afternoon. The room is empty except for the bartender swatting at…
MASTHEAD Directors DeWitt Henry Peter O'Malley Coordinating Editor for This Issue Maxine Kumin Managing Editor Jennifer Rose Office Manager Don Lee Thanks this issue to: Roland Kelts, Mary Ellen Beveridge, Sharon Bogue, Kathleen Bowden, Catherine Creegan, Kirsten Czupryna, Emilia Dubicki, Beth Elion, Carol Feingold, Anne Friedman, Kahtryn Herold, Doina Iliescu, Jean Kane, Naomi Kent, Tom…
1. Two men, doubtless brothers, both huge and with the same blank judicious face, slump on a baggage cart. Near them a decapitated deer, tied to another cart. Sag of heavy meat, blood stench, a pool of blood widening on the station floor. Pay attention, hisses the mind, a lesson here. And it's true, in…
after Lewis Hine Maybe her crossed black and white eyes wept, as each acceleration of the immense cotton lyre deafened her. Maybe the voice and face of Jesus comforted her breathing, in the mill's fire- inhibiting drenched air. What's clear is this: dazed, grateful, she stood one day at the picket gate, just there, smiling…
Three deer stare into the dark rooms as if I had something they could take back with them. Opaque at the window, I breathe with the house. Now they dent the thick-ribbed ice with their fine hooves for apples preserved like rubies under glass. They are simple as monks gathered in the orchard after vespers,…
High above, the flock hones itself to winter leanness, a plow. The point enters spilling its message. When one in that two-strand of dark moves out I'm uneasy until the others regroup, enfold it. There is no possibility of loss, the community knows where it must go. Threaded, no one can fall as it heads…
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