I called her my untamable cupcake, she was a humanoid in jodhpurs, a jigsaw on the stage of the ballet. We met in a tourist cabin near a famous crater. Macaroni in leotards, I noted in my notebook. She could prattle until the floodlights goo-ed her lollipop. A sarcasm, fervent and amplified, that could stop…
In every direction drought breaks this land down to the lapses, the scraps of itself: water recoiling from the riverbank, sparse crops corroding in the fields where a crow’s tailfeathers scratch up the ground’s faintest color — drooping, the trees split . . . I feel as highstrung as a woodharp, its sweet sharp whine…
It’s that vague feeling of panic That sweeps over you Stepping out of the #7 train At dusk, thinking, This isn’t me Crossing a platform with the other Commuters in the sad half-light Of evening, that must be Someone else with a newspaper Rolled tightly under his arm Crossing the stiff, iron tracks Behind the…
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 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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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