Article

  • Old Man Shovelling Snow

    Bend your back to it, sir: for it will snow all night. How gently they sink — white spiders, multi-bladed bleak things, these first, into the nearly mirror of your shovel's surface. It snows, lightly — wide columns of black between each flake but it will snow all night, and thicker. So, you start now…

  • Staying at Grandma’s

    Sometimes they left me for the day while they went — what does it matter where — away. I sat and watched her work the dough, then turn the white shape yellow in a buttered bowl. A coleus, wrong to my eye because its leaves were red, was rooting on the sill in a glass…

  • What Ernest Says

    This is what Ernest whispers to her. "You ever had a man to go down on you? How you like me to be going down on you? How you like that? You like Ernest to eat you out? "You ever suck black cock? How you like suckin me off?" When Miss Foote calls on her,…

  • Kwashiorkor, Marasmus

    An unknown river whose banks drip feathers, orchid petals, wherein live fish mysterious; a medieval scholar, humanist scamp. No, a rare, rich dish, thick with crème fraîche; the local junior high known for annual bake sales. A beautiful African princess, two thousand cows her dowry; a town in New Jersey. A defunct balm or salve;…

  • Religious Thought

    for . . . . Beyond anything else, he dwells on what might inhabit his      mind at the moment of his death, that which he'll take across with him, which will sum his      being up as he's projected into spirit. Thus he dwells upon the substance of his consciousness, what      its contents are at any…

  • Tune: Raise The Cup. No. 2

         A white horse, a jade crop, and gilded reins:                  so easy for a young man            to say farewell. The road into the distance is a million miles long.      If you're saddened by clouds and water in a strange land, fill your cup with wine, I beg you with tears.                  …

  • Nine Poems

    trans. Portuguese Lisa Sapinkopf 1. Luminous the abolished days When noon bent the columns' shadows And the blue of the sky was drinking up the earth Grown calm in the murmur Of the foliage and the gods. 2. L'Age D'Airain (Rodin) Slowly, slowly, before the light, Laden with shadows and weight, Pulling his body up…

  • Study for Sleep (cover)

    What's A Story Mary Ward Brown Rosellen Brown Robert Cohen Carol Cosman Louise Glück Brenda Hillman Rhoda Huffey Jeff Hush August Kleinzahler Phillip Lopate Thomas McGuane Sue Miller Oscar Pemantle Mary Peterson Edgar Poma C. E. Poverman David Reid Danny Romero Roger Salloch Jean-Paul Sartre Gary Soto Edited by Leonard Michaels ISSN 0048-4474

  • Tune: Song Of An Immortal. No. 2

    Return deep in the night, drunk out of my mind, I'm helped stagger through the tasselled door-way, still      unsobered; pass out cold: wine stench blends with the scent of musk      and orchid.                  I wake up with a start:                  HA! HA! HA! I've always said,            ”How long can a man live?”