Article

  • Real Life Christmas Card

    Robin, I watch you. You are perfect robin — except, shouldn’t you be perched on a spade handle? Robin, you watch me. Am I perfect man — except, shouldn’t I have poison in my pocket, a gun in my hand? I, too, am in my winter plumage, not unlike yours, except, the red is in…

  • Cavafy in Alexandria

    He’s everywhere here; not as he looks in his photos but in his mind, habits — that elegantly refined, withdrawn decadence. I glimpse or pass him everywhere: at night walking quickly down a back alley close to the walls’ shadow, afternoons in a teahouse alone glancing over the edge of his foreign newspaper, the rims…

  • The Sayings of Mr. Purple

    None of his friends could say what made Purple tick. He had an observable routine, the same as a number of others from the British colony in this Costa Del Sol fishing village cum retirement-tourist village: coffee and red wine to wake up in the morning (1 or 2 in the afternoon) at the Calle…

  • Contributors’ Notes

    MASTHEAD Directors DeWitt Henry Peter O'Malley Coordinating Editor for This Issue DeWitt Henry CONTRIBUTORS DAVID BOSWORTH lives in Cambridge. His short fiction has appeared in The Ohio Review, The Antioch Review and The Agni Review, and his non-fiction in The Antioch Review. He has been awarded an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship for 1979-80. R. V….

  • The Well Dreams

    The well dreams; liquid bubbles. Or it stirs as a water spider skitters across; a skinny legged dancer. Sometimes, a gross interruption: a stone plumps in. That takes a while to absorb, to digest, much groaning and commotion in the well’s stomach before it can proffer again a nearly sleek surface. Even a pebble can…

  • Rathlin Island

    A long time since the last scream cut short — Then an unnatural silence; and then A natural silence slowly broken By the shearwater, by the sporadic Conversation of crickets, the bleak Reminder of a metaphysical wind. Ages of this, till the report Of an outboard motor at the pier Fractures the dream-time, and we…

  • Turnhole

    We part the leaves: Jim Toorish stood, small, squat, naked in the churning middle of the dark turnhole. Black hair on his poll, a roll of black hair over his stomach, that strange tussock below. With a rib of black fur along his back from tight neckbone to simian buttocks. From which — inescapable —…