High above the slant snow and sludged traffic, smug as Horace on the Sabine Farm and twice as indolent, I read Horace until the gray is wholly drained from the afternoon. The docile sheep, the fire fed by a servant, those jars of Falernian for which the occasion is pleasure itself maturing in the cellar…
They have grafted pieces of an ape with a dog. . . Then, what they have, wants to live in a tree. No, it wants to lift its leg and piss on the tree. . .
MASTHEAD Directors DeWitt Henry Peter O'Malley Coordinating Editor for This Issue Leonard Michaels Managing Editor Jennifer Rose CONTRIBUTORS At 68, Mary Ward Brown will have her first collection of stories, Tongues of Flame, published by E. P. Dutton/Seymour Lawrence this July. Her work appeared in Best American Short Stories, 1984. She lives in Browns, Alabama….
It's dark when they scuff off to school. It's good to trample the thin panes of casual ice along the tracks where twice a week an anachronistic freight lugs grain and radiator hoses to a larger town. It's good to cloud the paling mirror of the dawn sky with your mouthwashed breath, and to thrash…
One night a woman's breast came to a man's room and began to talk about her twin sister. Her twin sister this and her twin sister that. Finally the man said, but what about you, dear breast? And so the breast spent the rest of the night talking about herself. It was the same as…
This is the Eastern shore. Light flatters the land. Nature is docile here. It is the time of year after the corn harvest and before the geese. It is my annual return. I live in Europe but my mother insists I come back each fall because each fall may be my father's last. The car…
I have a photograph of my father wearing a black tuxedo and holding a suckling pig under his arm. He's on stage. Two dark-eyed beauties in low-cut party dresses are standing next to him and giggling. He's laughing too. The pig has its mouth open, but it doesn't look like it's laughing. It's New Year's…
1. Spring, and so they danced mid-air. He circled and repeated until she paused to a second's locking. Gazing by the window, dishtowel in hand, I almost missed it: red and gold, two velvets shivering, then she was away. He perched on the nearest branch; dead-still, head cocked, as if to save the event, as…
20/The Moon, the Whole Moon, and Nothing But the Moon Glorious, nourishing, flourishing moon, swollen with all the raw energy of time and what it does as light, I take off my hat, my coat, my tie, my shoes and socks to you. Breathing you in like an oceanic breeze, how can I expect to…
No products in the cart.