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World Enough

But only someone who is ready for everything, who excludes nothing, not even the most enigmatical, will live the relation to another as something alive and will himself draw exhaustively from his own existence. . . . We have no reason to mistrust our world, for it is not against us. Has it terrors, they…

Kansas: before the war

They are everywhere in the wild lights past the hammering of the dawn, the colors shooting off those sounds, and she can talk to them, she says, “communicate” in the same way distant cousins lean over corpses and say something appropriate but inaccurate. Stars cinder where the jungle ends, at the furthest outskirt of the…

Bijou

The film which rumor has made the dernier cri of this year's festival is finally screened. It begins without credits, challenging the audience from its opening frame. Not only has it been shot in black and white, but the black and white do not occur in usual relationships to one another. There is little grey….

Contributors’ Notes

MASTHEAD Directors DeWitt Henry Peter O'Malley Coordinating Editor for This Issue Lorrie Goldensohn Fiction Supplement Editor Jayne Anne Phillips Managing Editor Joyce Peseroff CONTRIBUTORS TOM ABSHER'S first collection of poems, Forms Of Praise, will be available from Ohio State University Press in January, 1981. In 1978 Absher was a YMHA Discovery Award Winner. MARVIN BELL…

A Dark Night

About four that afternoon the thunder and lightning began again. The five women seated about Mrs. Boone's one-room apartment grew still and spoke with lowered voices and in whispers, when they spoke at all: they were no longer young, and they had all been raised to believe that such weather was the closest thing to…

Ul’Lyu, Ooo, Ooo, Ooo

We live on dead worlds. I can recall my first meeting with Ul'Lyu, when I began to realize what that meant. And this was only our first meeting. This was before I came to see the carnival lights inside her, before I started to needle her with my pet rhyme on her name, "you jewel-you,…

An Interview with Michael S. Harper

The interview with Michael S. Harper took place in Harper's condominium, a reconstructed factory building in downtown Providence. There was a huge decorated Christmas tree, a good feeling of space in the giant, somewhat loosely partitioned main room, and Michael's wife, Shirley, and their three children, Roland, Patrice and Rachel were about. During the interview,…

Eternity

The time comes when you count the names — whether Dim or flaming in the head’s dark, or whether In stone cut, time-crumbling or moss-glutted. You count the names to reconstruct yourself. But a face remembered may blur, even as you stare At a headstone. Or sometimes a face, as though from air, Will stare…

In The Himalayas

Men who do not wear watches know The sad infusion a concave glass Withholds. A life readies For forgetfulness its forward distances, But these wheels return their moment In the thrash of sex. When afterwards You ask what time it is, I cannot forswear How near we are to that far country Where the sun…