Article

A Figure on the Ice

1            The last thing I remember when I was a boy In the North winter I’d line the barrels up Sixteen or eighteen abreast across the pond And back off, way off, and hone my blades and paw At the ice, then skate full on, take soaring to the air And land on barrel…

Contributors’ Notes

MASTHEAD Directors DeWitt Henry Peter O'Malley Coordinating Editor for This Issue Ellen Bryant Voigt Editor for Criticism Lorrie Goldensohn CONTRIBUTORS TOM ABSHER was one of four winners of the 1978 Nation-YMHA Discovery Awards. He lives in Vermont. ANGELA BALL is completing a Ph.D. at University of Denver. JANE BARNES edits Dark Horse. MICHAEL BENEDIKT is…

For Marcus Lynch

A man enters the room, a doctor, who looks like my mother. He has my mother’s dark hair. He moves closer under the light. I can smell his clean starched shirt, the sleeves rolled up, the collar button loose. I can see my face in the mirror tied to his forehead, the light in my…

Blue Spruce

I’ve got a feeling that moves me deep inside oh yeah I’ve got a feeling I think I’ll put it into verse oh yeah in fact this feeling of mine is almost an idea, or a pair of ideas with a feeling attached, or rather the two ideas swim in the feeling like eccentric bathers…

Summer in Bodines

     —For Brenda and Jerry Each day I take the bike out, riding deeper and deeper into my own dark forest, green, wet with the eyes of animals. I am following the dead, their distant backs, hoping they’ll turn and be themselves when they see I know them; the deer, in that new country so still,…

Western North Carolina

Consider the annals of a small town in western North Carolina. Assemble the interesting sequences of fact and supposition from several points of view. Sift. Beyond a certain point, you say, these facts are not interesting; or, you say you’ll never be able to uncover details vivid enough to be interesting. You are wrong on…

Love Poem

Warned, warned for years what too much love would do, I settled for never enough. I did not have a body, sleeping in the attic, spare and still, suns falling past the tiny window, blooded, always the maples whispering below, rattling with leaves, rattling with emptiness. Too much sleeping woke me. My arms opened first,…