Between the hand in the child’s trouser pocket And his face tilted toward the sky, blank as the sky, The man could see a question forming. Small White clouds hung above the irregular Chimneys the length of the avenue. The sidewalk Was empty, except for a woman at the bus-stop Rhythmically slapping a newspaper against…
MASTHEAD Directors DeWitt Henry Peter O'Malley Coordinating Editor for This Issue Gail Mazur CONTRIBUTORS JUDITH BAUMEL has poems published or forthcoming in The New Republic, Mademoiselle, The Nation, and The Paris Review. She teaches English at Boston University. MARIANNE BORUCH is living and teaching in Taiwan. She has poems forthcoming in The Iowa Review and…
I sit in my stockyard of a room: a whole trainload of footwear, a desk of paper innuendos, correspondence with the invalids. . . . Dear Sympathy, One leg, an entire memory bank forgotten, where have you flown? Better to float on a raft out to sea: there’s the great ocean to swallow me up,…
More and more I think about you, and the others — your likes and unlikes — who chose to harden their difference until it was so dense, it would shine of itself in the dark; lived narrow into towers, to the faces of wives and children loved more steadily than most; turned their even-planed desks…
Love, the flower bed we tended Has grown into a congregation Of tufted old men and arthritic women, The men’s beards scattered by evening winds, The red and yellow dresses of the women Disintegrating Into the earth. And though we were gentle and steady, We called attention to ourselves In every corner of the world….
When, at the age of twenty-four I sold my first short story – for ten dollars to the now defunct Colorado Quarterly – I had already accumulated, by count, 576 rejection slips. I had also, by this time, written seven unpublished novels. About six months before, after an especially discouraging run of rejections, I'd tried…
This fog over the body and mind, this sleeping too long on the grill of the mattress while morning pours in. . . . It’s ten below. The sun is shining but it’s too cold to go out. The children, true, are bundled up, drive their snowmobiles over the ice with a swishing sound, a…
(Ormos Athinios, Thira) Morning comes, and the baked look of rising early on people’s faces; or evening, and the cool with a trace of rot in it lifts off the face of the waves. And in the concrete cafe, the simple blank shoulders of fascination, changed in no year; with emptiness in their mouths —…
My handwriting’s big, like grazing cattle, I’m learning cursive on the dock The summer that polio twists my mother’s legs. I write as she reads me the fable Of the prince who was sleepless for 100 years. There’s always a broken heart And I know sleepless nights are already a spell. White gauze, the curtains…
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