This unavoidable pilgrimage is my self-portrait: Wandering through poppies in the Provençal fields, I heard spades sink in gravelly ground, an old woman digging Turf. In the furrows, a flute fallen among sunflowers. I played peasant songs for plates of boiled potatoes To commoners and wanderers in the shadows of a cypress. Night painted no […]
Contributors 81
James Cihlar: Mr. Purvis
“You might die writing a five hundred page novel” –Alice Munro What we must know at seventy-eight. The thrill a veteran with leukemia gets when comparing his slutty masseuse Roxanne to Alexander the Great’s wife Roxanne. Earnest Bottoms, a country scholar’s nickname for Ernie Botts, her neuter cousin. Death is on the horizon. We can […]
Hillery Stone: Losing Another
Again they’re taking a tooth, this time a molar at the very back. It’s dead, they say. Rotting the gum right through. It’s all so definite: a sweep of the occlusal surfaces; a hulking metal plate jammed in. This is the way with things gone bad. The root is where the justice is. What is […]
Susanna Rich: Now That We’re Done I Need to Retrieve Something
…no, not the birthday whatever, bagged holiday, or drugstore forgive-me thing; nor the lend/misplace/forget or hand-me-over migrations; nor the fix/yard sale/consign on my behalf I’m missing some feathered part of me that swims starlight waves sage brush, chants summer dreams…just let me breathe what you never- mind: your freezer’s atmosphere, your attic fan’s exhaust, the […]
Laura McCullough: The Ways Water is Used
Her youngest daughter’s thick curly hair should not be washed every night; she knows this, but her daughter begs her to do it, loves the ritual, the smell of the shampoo and cream rinse. It is becoming a chore, the mother thinks, the child getting big enough to do this herself. Her own hair is […]
Blythe Davenport: Relief
What do you do when your sculpture stares back at you? Poke its eyes, if it has eyes? Stone pupils can’t feel pain. When your statue gazes with a judgment that says I’ll protect you from you have you done it right or wrong? The bas relief mastiff on the Fidelity building hides his nose […]