How the coffin was not even carried by pall bearers but lamely rolled on wheels from the hears. Not even the weight of the body. Not that last presence felt by any other body. Alex in aluminum. Left out of the earth under the hired canvas pavilion on that plastic grass. One of the hinges…
Strolling through Carcasonne is, after all, Of interest, to the noonday touring spirit That moves us toward the booth, clapping as help In ages past the Michelin testament. One notes the battlements, presentable As any movie-set; the tidy chapel, Its table for petition-signing busy Amid the Gothic shades; houses and shops Leaning together over courts…
MASTHEAD Directors DeWitt Henry Peter O'Malley Coordinating Editor for This Issue Jay Neugeboren Managing Editor Joyce Peseroff CONTRIBUTORS GINA BERRIAULT is the author of three novels, The Descent, Conference of Victims, and The Son, and a collection of 15 stories, The Mistress and Other Stories. She lives in San Francisco. Her story, "The Infinite Passion…
The yellow ball just clears the net, skids low. Your racket reaches, flicks, and floats it back. We hit this poem together and watch it shuttle, Weave against the green of someone else’s youth, The emerald pathos of a dozen different parks. Back and forth, we build a rhythm, increase the pace, Then break. With…
Once a firm-voiced, hard-nerved house surrounded her early-morning movements; children, like rushing corpuscles, defended her sea-split marriage which she supported like a harvest tray right up to the end of the return journey. We all fight back on a shoe-string she might have said had you touched her where the torture-marks still burn; but she…
The hacked-off head of Holofernes plumps like picked fruit in a sack: part of a story patterned in the inlaid wood here in the house of God that great bloodletter Colleoni built who didn’t admit forbidden fruit but plucked what he liked and sucked it dry. All around his frescoes say this life is a…
She kept his dream between two flat covers, the cardboard extending down the right, through the center, and over the left of the dream, buckling somehow, if dreams do that, where the softest interior bled, inconveniently, for the crimson was such a bother to her, in keeping the hidden dream white. The hard mark of…
Like the shock-absorber she is, veranda-stop to all passers-by (to those who travel and return, to those who stayed and stayed), she sits between the water mint and the flowering bitter aloes, in the cracks of the new colony, believing in the honeycomb shapes spliced into the dividing twilight, believing, contrary to the logic of…
Between the river and that Country Girl who sits forgotten on her hill we wandered through a zone of shops where antique furniture is wrought to reborn lustre long forgot by men who seem as woody as their craft humming burdens to their saws while chips fake haloes in their hair. The gracious forms restored…
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