Article

The Gods

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…

Contributors’ Notes

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,…

Either/And

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…

The Public Job of Blood

What we wondered as kids about the light in the icebox I'm wondering now about love. The apple digesting itself in the pantry. The corpse in need of a shave. All that goes on when no one's around to see it or say what it means. All the king's horses fed to the dogs, the…

Introduction

Editing a literary magazine — and this is the first time I have undertaken a project so fraught with hubris — turns out to be a little like buying birthday presents for your loved ones. You tend to get them things you really want for yourself. In making selections for this issue I have been…

Back to the Present

I'm not trying to manipulate reality, please put that grain      of sand back where you got it, thanks, but above all—way high up, above cities, clouds, classes— to make you see, and me write, the silent tip of the talking      iceberg, putting one word in front of another. Not I, but the Gross National Product,…

The Fourth Wall

In Soweto today, two black men, one in the rulers' blue, one in civilian drab—ankle-length britches, a shirt whose once-distinct stripe has faded— faced one another. Each believed the other would take what the believer had—his power, his life— and believed that he, in that instant of history, embodied the force of history. I do…

For the Missing in Action

Hazed with harvest dust and heat the air swam with flying husks as men whacked rice sheaves into bins and all across the sunstruck fields red flags hung from bamboo poles. Beyond the last treeline on the horizon beyond the coconut palms and eucalyptus out in the moon zone puckered by bombs the dead earth…

Motion

There is a store, it is an individual, like you, me, a body, corporate, you or I might go into this store and see racks of empty cardboard boxes covered with a picture and with words on the back with the typeface neutral and readable while the title on the front reaches out by some…