Article

  • Holding Court

    I am willing to die at some time but on a morning choice as this I would find it too hard to give up the lavish details of this world voluntarily. Content as I am in my study of whatever passes my wrought-iron chair, I listen to all the varied forms of peace: the wind…

  • Lord of Autumn

    Gordon He pressed the side of his face to the pillow and waited for the sound of birds. The room was black, the window open; when a breeze came the curtains billowed out against a lighter sky. He heard the clock. He heard the dry sound of Helen breathing; there was a sigh and a…

  • The Mechanics of Repair

    for Andy and Gail How did I spend my evening? By coming home in rain that slowly translated itself into curtain after curtain of oriental beads that I brushed through cold and very tired. All winter the repairman has come dressed in sweaters, never coats, crouched in darkness at the heart of things, trying to…

  • Running Out

    Not much time left      here      in the other Brooklin      overlooking      Herrick Bay driven like an anchor into the town's center it is as though all of the animals had come out of the woods      to speak      now      in that instant      when the season      flees and leaves its shards in the middens the black bear, the…

  • Contributors’ Notes

    MASTHEAD Directors DeWitt Henry Peter O'Malley Coordinating Editors for This Issue Jane Shore Ellen Wilbur Managing Editor Susannah Lee CONTRIBUTORS Julie Agoos has work forthcoming in Crazy Horse. Her poems have appeared in Antaeus, The Antioch Review, and Quarry West. She teaches writing in Baltimore. Debra Allbery is an Ohio native, received an M.F.A. from…

  • Open Casket

    In the pink light of the funeral parlor they spread her out, the arc of a lamp overseeing the calm colors of her folded hands. How far away from us she lies in the big, serious casket like a creche, holding as it does her babied corpse. Visitors in clumps of twos and threes sway…

  • The Long March

    The Rabbi saw a Torah-scroll surrounded by a fence with one picket missing. . .The iron points glowed, and the gap was like a missing tooth in the face of God. So Talmud was written. I let the book slide to the floor, and shred puckers on the pink chenille bedspread. This is my new…

  • The Light That Stops Us

    The morning a wind was up but I stopped to look anyway, bent barefoot to a net of flashing crystals, grass tips had picked their green way into a spider's threaded fan spread on the lawn last night— and standing, I saw the bone from inside the raspberry still hung on the stem, that white…

  • Tall Woman Love

    Beal comes in the night. "Auntie!" he says softly with his lips against the glass. The door is latched. Just a thin latch, not meant to keep out something big. Beal taps the glass with his knuckles. "Auntie! It's me!" Among the hairs of a young boy's beard, pimple scars have been carved, concave as…