I could remember a big black car bumping my dog Skippy's head on the highway when I was seven years old. Skippy didn't die, but he went insane. I remember hearing dogs howl in the Sacramento Delta migrant camp where I grew up, accurately signaling someone's death the day after. When I was ten, I…
Just me and St. John of the Cross in our little room, starving and half-dead. We play bride and bridegroom as the sun rises, the stones cool under our heads . . . He always wants to be the bride, I let him cuz he's so sweet. In the afternoons he teaches me how to…
The big one went to sleep as to die and dreamed he became a tiny one. So tiny as to have lost all substance. To have become as theoretical as a point. Then someone said, get up, big one, you're not doing yourself any good. You puddle and stagnate in your weight. Best to be…
i Thrusting from the head of Picasso's goat are bicycle handlebars. They don't represent anything, but they are goat's horns, as night is a black bat, metaphorically. Come into the garden. . . . . .the black bat night has flown. Metaphor, like the night, is an idea in flight; potentially, a story: There was…
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…
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