In her studio an artist begins to paint a portrait of Saint Francis in his beast-colored robe. He is bending slightly forward preaching to the birds. With short vertical strokes she paints the birds white, the mountains blue. She outlines the features of his face, thin lips, high cheekbones, a golden halo. She paints the…
MASTHEAD Directors DeWitt Henry Peter O'Malley Coordinating Editor for This Issue Charles Simic Managing Editor Jennifer Rose CONTRIBUTORS Jonathan Aaron's Second Sight was published by Harper & Row in 1982. He is currently finishing his second collection and learning to speak Spanish. Roberta Bienvenu lives in Boone County, Missouri. Lynn Boulger is alive and well…
So what if your name is “Burning Bush”— hair like fire, that bright, that red. And fingers delicate as birthday candles. So what if you look a little eerie, so pale and thin astride that bony nag. Still you are the luminous madonna — both lodestar and throat-lump in one. Without you, my voice…
Everyone wore evening clothes, Got in and out of supercharged saloons The size of drawing rooms, And lived in a nightclub To the tune of watery. Latin rhythms I could pick up on my crystal set. Radio antennas also emitted Cute little bolts of lightning That flew through the air bearing The message: Balloonists Found,…
In one of his poems, Wallace Stevens leaves us a record of the writer as connoisseur, imposing order on chaos, and, on the other hand, deliberately upsetting the established order. Elizabeth Sewell, in The Structure of Poetry, views the process of writing poems as a mediation between extremes from logic to nightmare. And these polarities…
1. Pastorale ”Lie down and stay down,” she shouts, once again underestimating the impact of her anatomy on mine. Her mistake's to place me too high on the ladder of being — she thinks I'm a bad dog and therefore corrigible. But the forces that rule me are beneath control — I'm only a tool…
for Tom Lux I hadn't known Miss Halloran, had never been one of her students, but the School Board must have decided attending her funeral would be educational for all of us. Turning around in the itchy, cushioned pew of Saint Mary's, I could see only kids. It was 1951. We collected bubblegum cards about…
The freezer holds only a few things. Fewer as it makes its ermine muff of frost, as it comes time, and overtime, to defrost. The shelves hold a few things. At the back on the lowest slab with the margarine, my withered corsage, red carnation: I dressed in black, and went on the bus to…
It was not my first death. I had coiled the rare wood and fabric of stiff kittens into a shoe box, toyed with the blood-dried stumps of squirrel tails after the hunt. I knew vertigo, large hands lowering me into a casket to kiss a grandparent's waxy cheek, the hot wind of palm leaf funeral…
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