Nonfiction

When I’m Gone

After my mother died, I needed a word to describe how I felt. When I couldn’t find one, I realized that what I needed was not so much a word, as a sound, a sob, or maybe even a howl, a noise only the other motherless could hear, and come running. If I couldn’t find…

Death and the Motorcycle

On a motorcycle, a dash to the grocery store takes on epic proportions. It requires armor: you pull on stiff black boots; zip yourself into a thick leather jacket with kevlar plates at the shoulder and elbow; squeeze into your helmet, buckle the chinstrap; pull on long leather gloves with hard knuckles. Hazards abound: cars…

Introduction

I love poets who bring us to our proper size. Think about taking a picture of a mile-high waterfall, and about that little human figure you need in the shot to suggest the magnitude caught in the image—the tiny person is the scale factor. It isn’t that true scale diminishes the human, but rather that…

Introduction

  "Here’s why I write. Because Poetry begins there where death had not the final word." —Odysseus Elytis   I sent out a call to some poets: friends, acquaintances, and some only known to me by their poems. Inevitably I forgot some, and also I am ignorant of many; forgive me. I asked for submissions…

Introduction

Running throughout this issue, though not by editorial design, is that typically postmodern sense of absence, in so many configurations: in the memoir, for instance, as loss; or in fiction, as the absence of fulfilled desire, the basic plot of a story being that someone wants something and has problems getting it; or in poetry,…

Lady Fingers

Chi Chi inhaled the screen from her crack pipe.”       I laugh and wait for Leslie to join in, but there is only silence on the other end of the line.       “You’re serious?” I ask.       “You better believe I’m serious. That child gone and almost killed herself.”       I want to apologize for laughing, thinking this was…

Introduction

As I was writing this introduction, a series of fierce storms began hitting sections of south central Iowa. Several weeks ago, an Iowa town named Parkersburg was completely destroyed, and the media focused on the efforts of the townspeople to contain the disaster. The storms persisted throughout most of Iowa, with extreme winds and torrential…