(The Ngas of Nigeria) On the sacred counting string, we call out the names. Raffia, for light in the palms, Ivory, color of bone. Our sons let moon waters drop into their cupped hands, into bowls of wine. Wives chop corn gold as the shoulders of a moon with child. We say light arrives. We…
Man up early. Musk-melon, horse-bean, sno-pea bundled away. Birds looting the lawn. Sliding across our pond two ducks at chess. The horizon injects herself. You cringe, spot the sun stealing oranges from the pockets of mountains. That seed-spitter. Where on earth is the lard-ball you hung on a bough till it swung like a Christmas…
MASTHEAD Directors DeWitt Henry Peter O'Malley Coordinating Editor for This Issue Derek Walcott Managing Editor Jennifer Rose Office Manager Jessica Dineen Thanks this issue to: Carolyn Shute, Don Lee, Anne Friedman, Doina Iliescu, Ellen Hinsey and Bill Keeney. CONTRIBUTORS Katy Aisenberg teaches at Tufts University and is working on her Ph.D. in English Literature from…
That's daughter, Orleen, in a tooled-leather frame; she hustles hard in back street bars way north of Nashville and the bus depot where she hollered goodbye. Brown, drowsy eyes and no money down, funneling through hours, a smudge of towns, shut-down mills, courthouse lawns; until the city slammed her awake with Dixieland jazz and the…
Red wax of the apple, small brown pears not yet figured: a perfect day's picking and still an untouched ladder slants under the seckle tree. The ashy-headed geese overhead trembling in a wedge: they too will go down in the hourglass this month, October, dingy Goya! Working until my hands are useless I hear in…
"My own experience [as a writer] indicates that it is mostly a career of rejection and lost illusions," Evan Connell wrote in a letter to me three years ago. Considering the critical acclaim he’s enjoyed over the past forty years (nominations for the National Book Award in both fiction and poetry, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a…
The east coast was west for us, and cold. For sore throats my mother made egg-lemon soup, her face misting over the big pot as it boiled another sea, the oar-shaped ladle lost in steam. Now the yellow lamb broth twirls open like a sunflower when I say “avgo-lemono.” The language breaks on this little…
Cottage in which quiet persuades me I am the only one who has made myself useful, like God beginning to eat his young: One by one like poisoned mice the years smell in the wall. Hell's Peeping Tom with his ruddy face takes a closer look in the hole. At dawn and at dusk, a…
How was it that Myott came to understand the nature of his hands? It happened like this. Even as a child he was, by temperament, a shy, gentle boy, quiet and self-contained, one not given to coveting the marginal compensations offered by an increasingly noisy and unprincipled world. His mother, who managed a religious bookstore…
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