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  • 400-Yard Girls’ Relay

    I was the first and slowest man—for that sort of thing, you called yourself a man. I handed the baton to Rae, who passed it to Sue, and on to Sharlene. We were the four best runners among the girls in our class. Rae got married in high school and had kids. Sue left college…

  • A Night in the Gardens

    There was a time when New York was everything to me: my mother, my mistress, my Mecca . . . . I distinctly remember wondering, stroll- ing the bright and un-blasted streets, why it was that all the other American cities weren't depopulated now that their young people were free once again to get up…

  • In Ignorance

    We wake with darkness pouring Into our mouths, sister sleep With her east-iron links Broken. Priests hunch over us; Unfeeling their words, the scorn that darkens Foreheads. Brother eyes brother, Lizards circling on a white, bare wall. Forgotten, the porcelain tub where children Scouted the soft edges of their bodies, safe In the maternal water…

  • Dream of Ivy

    You know the story of the woman in a turret and how ivy puts its fingers across the moon. And besides, no one could hear. Ivy that grows forever against the dankest part of a wall gnawing gargoyles deep in the belly of the house. I would have lowered my long hair to a lover…

  • The Latest From France

    Déconstruction est passée, as they say on the Champs-Elysées. One mirror facing another inside a mirrored sphere spins scintillations too tiny and brief to illuminate the unetherized body slabbed for autopsy. Deconstruction is reflective, but of what? Of collective despair, some scholars think. Though we each push our own hopes before us like wheel-barrows through…

  • Bread

    That sadness of white bread— To weave a noose of farewell Like the lightbulb over the supper table Transcribing a circle, where your forehead meets the world, Where your words become other people And you are doled out, eaten without butter. *     *     *      Because I love you the ceiling and the air Suddenly matter. Split clear…

  • Artist Colony Applications

    take me I'm paranoid enough to imagine the woman with towels steams letters off my corrasible bond and rearranges them to tell the cooks not to serve me the right meat I have English publishers who will scale sheer stone and glass on days when nothing much is happening my typewriter's often mistaken for the…

  • Contributors’ Notes

    MASTHEAD Directors DeWitt Henry Peter O'Malley Coordinating Editor for This Issue DeWitt Henry Associate Fiction Editor Don Lee Managing Editor Jennifer Rose Office Manager Jessica Dineen Thanks this issue to: Susan Whitmore, Catherine Creegan, Sharon Bogue, Bethanne T. Elion, Robert Arnay, Sydney Fadner, Sandi Tyler, Melanie Rae Thon, Mariette Lippo, Eileen Pollack, Carol Magun Feingold,…

  • Delicious Monstrosity

    With the flat side of white plastic spatulas three old ladies hunch on a park bench, slapping gobs of blackberry jam onto slabs of dark bread. Nearby a hobo rolls over on his belly, spots the women and thinks just how sweet that jam would taste. Slowly, he gets to his feet. The women do…