When I take you in my mouth, it is all just a matter of identity. I study the weather reports. In a photo essay of Sun Valley Ski Lodge, under her picture, there is this: “Sonja Henie starred in Sun Valley Serenade BUT NEVER VISITED THE PLACE.” Wait, I think hear the phone. The child,…
Asked what he worked at, Oscar Wilde's brother Willie would reply, "At intervals." This kind of innocuous controlled explosion which sends a phrase sky-high the moment before it reassembles, younger and wiser and apparently unfazed, is analogous to the effect achieved by certain poems. It defamiliarizes, yes, but mostly in order to refamiliarize. It glamorizes…
Sweet Jesus, talking his melancholy madness, stood up in the boat and the sea lay down, silky and sorry. So everybody was saved that night. But you know how it is when something different crosses the threshold—the uncles mutter together, the women walk away, the young…
To find a bit of thread But twisted In a peculiar way And fallen In an unlikely place A black thread Before the mystery Of the closed door The greater mystery Of the four bare walls And catch oneself thinking Do I know anyone Wearing such dark garments Already worn to threads First thing in…
Out of oblivion, birds the heron arranging its shawls, the tick of a blackbird, there, like a Chinese spoon, gulls in gutta-percha overshoes, and then the sound of the sea getting out of the bath. In the big bedroom, my friend's mother is dying in front of the children, wishing to spare them her struggle…
“They said it was the most just of wars because it was against barbarians.” Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle 1. An Irate Official Aren't they going to attack? What do they mean with their casual demand for tribute and provisions? We're a ten-gated city, not a cluster of hovels at a dusty crossroads….
The statues of Greek Gods In the storage room of the art school Where I led Pamela by the hand— Or was it she who led me? Bit my ear, while I raised her skirt. Identical Apollos held identical Empty hands. Poor, imitations, I thought. They belong in a window Of a store going out…
MASTHEAD Directors DeWitt Henry Peter O'Malley Coordinating Editor for This Issue Bill Knott Prose Editor Mary Karr Managing Editor Jennifer Rose Office Manager Don Lee Thanks this issue to: Louisa Solano, Becky Shipp, Claudia Keelan, Bethanne T. Elion, and Kathleen Bowden. CONTRIBUTORS Ai's latest book, Sin, was published in 1986 by Houghton Mifflin. This fall,…
My deepest secret but not my weight and credit rating. The not-I burns the day-care center somewhere near the edge of the non-example in northern Nicaragua because pity has a pre-modern ten-year-old face with a hundred and eighty handpainted freckles. My repetitions but not my death. It was either a new car or staying home…
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