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Contributors’ Notes

MASTHEAD Directors DeWitt Henry Peter O'Malley Coordinating Editor for This Issue Donald Hall Managing Editor Joyce Peseroff CONTRIBUTORS Ellery Akers is a free-lance writer and naturalist living in California. Her work has been published in the Harvard Magazine, the Northwest Review, the Aspen Anthology, and Intro 6. Bob Arnold is a Vermont stonemason. His most…

Veterans Day, 1981

In last week’s New York Times I read the First Lady’s announcement from the White House: a joke writer was hired until it all blew over, the enemy’s cheap shots about expensive gowns and china. Appease your critics with a laugh, she said. Disarm them. Meanwhile the paper’s full of arms deals. “Capability” is spread…

from Seduction by Light

(a novel-in-progress) After you struggle up Santa Monica thru all that thick stop and go traffic and racket, you make those turns and suddenly it's quiet. When you start seein more trees and tall hedges and high walls than you do people, then you know youre in Beverly Hills. At the gate I had to…

Genesis 1-2:4

In the beginning, God made HEAVEN and EARTH. The earth without form was waste. DARKNESS was the face of the deep. His spirit was the wind brooding over the waters. *     *      * In darkness he said,                -LET THERE BE LIGHT. There was light. In light he said, IT IS GOOD. God, dividing darkness from light,…

At Half Century

     ”And look, Daedalus still      hasn’t invented      the wings.”            Miroslav Holub Somewhere, a gardener translates the labyrinth into a maze of hawthorne and yew, and though the minotaur sleeps, the hawthorne is sharp as a rosebush, the yewberries are bright with poison. It is evening. I have watched the children wander off into their lives,…

from Civil Wars

I. There was nothing she could do – she caught the boy red-handed. He was kneeling in front of a cabinet in the den (behind its sliding door their raggedy liquor collection and a pile of ancient magazines with their pages violated, torn out for urgent political purposes, covers disheveled), and he was apparently concentrating…

In the Hospital For Tests

A dripping, numbing girl, surf tearing her In half, stands in monstrous silhouette Before a phallus of plate-glass Smeared with the sun’s endless honey. This is the kind of place where dying could be easy, The dazzle of the ocean like the flashbulbs of paparazzi. Or else you lose yourself in this wilderness of dots:…

Remission

It seems you must grow into your death slowly, as if it were a pair of new shoes waiting on the closet floor, smelling of the animal it came from, but still too big too stiff for you to wear. Meanwhile you dance barefoot your shaky dance of pretence, and we dance with you, the…