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…
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…
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…
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,…
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