For six years, having no child, your father and I taped cardboard to our window, photographed butterflies on Sundays, ate or did not eat, fought over who would do dishes. I entertain you with stories. . . . Our white dog as a pup came home purple — the next day I found the pokeberry…
My mouth starts speaking in another direction Of how apples are falling into red smoke And the sun no longer publishes each leaf, or name. I want to know what’s forbidden, To enter that space An apple takes from the heart of tree. Dark radiance, your hands have unpeeled this story To the edge of…
The silent train ascended through forest and alongside a torrent so cold and so swift the water was white, and small white birds flew up like spray. On a bridge undergoing repairs the train came to a halt. Just outside Thomas Lang’s window, a workman in a black knit cap was hammering at a railing,…
The river is fast and black and theatrically high. Chest-deep, you strain, lean against the current. You hand me up Keith, dripping and cough-crying From the fast black river I’ve climbed from. I run him breathless to the house, bone-cold, blue, Hurry him into a hot tub. The skin, numb, stings Back to feeling. The…
Seated in the dark, my elbows propped on the kitchen table, I cannot clearly recollect you who move inside me like water within motion though I choose you over and over with care, and though my notion of air beats in my temples as if I’ve gone through your heart to get to it. Touchable,…
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…
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