You might see a thin air in early April part the long grass, bleached and laid back, to breathe on your nape, the backs of your hands. It might smell like a cellar, full of coffins and canning. You would not name it, since all names become one in that time, and would you speak…
Twenty-seven-year-old William E. Griffis, a native of Philadelphia, took a leave of absence from Rutgers Theological Seminary in the fall of 1869 in order to accept a three-year position as a teacher of natural science in Fukui, a Japanese feudal domain (feudalism ended in the fall of 1870) just beginning to modernize. Arriving in Yokohama…
EVENT: The caretaking lady next door was horsing around with the horse who wanted to kick her because he had a sore she was trying to put something on. It's an old Morgan, swaybacked, still beautiful in head and stride, but bored in retirement. It will come to the fence to say hello even to…
At first they repel me, the octopus cactus with its spines, the hedgehog cactus, cane cholla, prickly pear. They are ungainly like the organ pipe plant or hug the ground with their wooly heads, their ribs seamed with barbed wire. But lacking grace, they are graceful, like Wei Fei the archer who in his old…
There is a child sitting next to me on this ratty old train, and he is more or less mine. Anyone watching us would not think us an unlikely pair. A young woman travelling with a seven year old kid. Her son, they would assume. I'm old enough, though I never can believe that I…
MASTHEAD Directors DeWitt Henry Peter O'Malley Coordinating Editors for This Issue Anne Bernays Justin Kaplan Managing Editor Susannah Lee CONTRIBUTORS Randolph Bates is associate director of the writing program at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts. His poems and stories have appeared in Southern Review, New Orleans Review, Seattle Review, and others. Sissela Bok…
Darwin never saw it. I can never remember its name. It had to exist because the orchid existed: Angraecum sesquipedale, loveliest of the white night-blooming orchids of Madagascar, its trailing nectary thin as a knitting needle. In those years I kept orchids as lonelier women keep cats, but I never told you that story, or…
In Transit There are times out of mind, times spent alone in a strange place waiting, times when the mind is alive and the body almost ruined, when you hallucinate on the real, and see it in the context of its meaning. These are the airplanes and buses of student fiction. Your thoughts quicken when…
This conversation took place in Philip Levine's home near the Tufts University campus where he teaches each autumn. During the winter and summer months, he and his wife Frances live in Fresno, California, although in the winter of 1985 Philip Levine will be a visiting professor at Brown University. Levine's Selected Poems was published in…
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