I make an elephant from the little I have. Wood from old furniture holds him up, and I fill him with cotton, silk, and sweetness. Glue keeps his heavy ears in place. His rolled-up trunk is the happiest part of his architecture. But there are also his tusks made of that rare material I cannot…
Houses. She has a gift for houses, she sees what they might be, and beneath her tanned and capable hands, they become what they might be, their possibilities are realized. When she house-hunts, which she has done too often to suit her, she stalks the right house, want ads circled, realtors in tow like native…
Chicory and queen anne’s lace line the way And orange day lilies, spread From the yard of some long vanished cabin. The statue of a button-eyed brown rabbit (When I am almost on him) Comes to life And leaps, excited and light-hearted, Into the brush. The lane is walled With dogwood of course and judas…
(from Contos de Aprendiz) I was born on a July afternoon in a small town called Turmalinas, which had a jail, a church and a school, all near each other. The jail, with its peeling wall, was old. God only knows how the prisoners inside lived and ate, but it held an inescapable fascination for…
MASTHEAD Directors DeWitt Henry Peter O'Malley Coordinating Editors for This Issue Tim O'Brien DeWitt Henry Henry Bromell Associate Editors James Randall Ellen Wilbur CONTRIBUTORS HENRY BROMELL'S book of stories, The Slightest Distance, was the 1974 winner of the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship Award. He has been teaching at the University of Iowa's Writers' Workshop. DEIRDRE…
It wasn’t my grandfather’s. He lectured at Tremont Hall On a snowy night. As a starter—just to break the ice—he cracked: “I’m glad the both of you could come.” There wasn’t even scattered laughter In the half empty house. After his peroration And after he had swept off back stage His Prince Albert skirts Breezing…
That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and…
For whom do I speak, now, so far away from home? For whom do I write, now, so far away from myself? I speak for the experience of the flux I’ve become; I write for the concrete to fill in the distances from the house on the road I lived on, from the warm home…
I first read Howl when I was a freshman in college. I thought that it was profound and disturbing, until a respected teacher asked me why all freshmen seemed to read Ginsberg, Kerouac, and Kahlil Gibran. I quit all three. Since then (like most people) I've got comfortable with A Supermarket in California and America;…
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