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  • Contributors’ Notes

    MASTHEAD Directors DeWitt Henry Peter O'Malley Coordinating Editor for This Issue Gail Mazur Managing Editor Joyce Peseroff CONTRIBUTORS JUDITH BAUMEL's poems have appeared in The Nation, The Antioch Review, and The New Republic. She teaches at Boston University and Harvard. FRANK BIDART's third book, The Sacrifice, will be published this fall by Random House. He…

  • A Beer Ain’t Got No Bone

    I can’t pick up the vacuum cleaner without remembering our most subtle and tender moments, shooing the sniper from the playground, then picking watermelons. For the past few months my life has read like canned food labels caked with panic. I don’t know if she’s still in Tokyo or on her way to Zanzibar. I…

  • The Czar’s Proclamation

    The slow light coming on, And sudden wind, dry heat And no dove song. I look up From whatever I have been All night thoughtfully reading, From the dim abstractions That crowd a table at dawn, And I hear my named called — A low, insistent sound — Though no one is here. All night…

  • Paradigm of Seasons

    Each year is like a snake that swallows its tail. How long since we have learned, of seasons, the paradigm? We know how cloud- scud and scut, north-bred, come      scouting The land out for winter, its waiting bulk. Come      skirmishing, flanking. Then red leaf, gold leaf, the winter's choked road. Spring Brings hope, even if…

  • Air Guitar

    Is it me there in the young clerk at the Circle-K, holding the neck of an invisible guitar, whose rock music rises above the explosions of a Star Wars game? Or am I standing, years before, stoned in front of a band, working frets, revving strings? Something flashes in the cash register’s bluish green digits,…

  • Led by the Hebrew School Rabbi

    Those good students who only loved working through pages of exercises, but were too good to object to the philanthropy of physical recreation took a bus to the Grand Concourse and another one down it, modelled after the Champs Elysees in Paris France, to the aging YMHA by Yankee Stadium. We stumbled on the basketball…

  • Sunset

    Clouds clamber, turgid, the mountain, peakward And pine-pierced, toward the Vulgar and flaming apocalypse of day, In which our errors are consumed Like fire in a lint-house — not repetitious But different each day, for day to day nothing Is identical to eye or soul. At night, at a late hour, I Have asked stars…

  • At the Common Table

    I stare into the glass-paned kitchen door to see a slight girl stuffing fruitcake in her mouth. She jerks with fright. I lean over a tin of World Famous Fruitcake and the world leans out: a woman eats from her cupped hand, over the sink while far away in wonder the aging boy who axe-murdered…