ISSUES | spring 1989

12.1 Cover

12.1 (Spring 1989)

Featuring the works of Chinua Achebe, David Baker, Walter Bargen, Jim Barnes, Kay Bonetti, Sharon Bryan, Michael Burns, Michael Collier, Glover Davis, Deborah Digges, Sascha Feinstein, H. E. Francis, Reginald Gibbons, Linda Hasselstrom, Ellen Herman, Jeffrey Harrison, John Hindelbrand, Andrew Hudgins, Richard Katrovas, William Kloefkorn, Candida Lawrence, Sydney Lea, Ellen Lesser, Stuart Lishan, Leslie Adrien Miller, Christopher Millis, Penelope Moffet, Robert Pope, Umberto Saba, Cathy Song, Gary Soto, Nancy Schoenberger, Marjorie Sinclair, Roberta Spear, Ann Townsend, Eric Tretheway, Robert Vasquez, Michael White, Gary Young… a found text by Sherwood Anderson… and an interview with Chinua Achebe.

CONTENT FROM THIS ISSUE

12.1 Cover

Nonfiction

Mar 01 1989

Friends of a Stranger

In October of 1962, when I flipped my pale-blue jacket over my shoulder and walked to the bus stop, I was sixteen years old, and a great deal had already occurred to change my life. As I walked, I watched my brothers pedaling their unicycles down the street to the left, their bright scarves flying from their throats, unfurling flags of red and yellow. In a rain of leaves which picked up the colors of my brother’s scarves, I fel extremely peaceful, from the bus stop, I ran into Killer–his eyes nervous, scanning the sidewalk, the grass, the trees for the slightest movement, drawn now to a tumbling leaf, again to the high, flitting tail of a black squirrel which seemed to follow us with a high-strutting jump and jump.

12.1 Cover

Fiction

Mar 01 1989

Cottages and Frozen River

For six months, Richard had his own office, windowless and spare. Then management hired a new programmer. Richard had hoped for a quiet man with a need for privacy that matched his own. But the new programmer seemed never to be quiet. His sneakers, gray with age and too large, squeaked when he walked and tapped the floor when he was at his desk. Seated, he muttered to himself, his long fingers strumming the plastic markers that stuck out of his open file drawer. He talked to his computer screen in a low, urgent voice, as if egging on a favorite horse. The walls of Richard’s office became pimpled with notes the programmer wrote to himself on yellow tabs he stuck to the wall, where they accumulated, their edges fluttering under the ceiling ventilator like a new kind of weather.

12.1 Cover

Fiction

Mar 01 1989

Touching Bottom

The woman I’ve been seeing lately won’t eat wild meat. Her ex-husband had been a hunter, and perhaps he’d been brutal in other ways or simply a bad cook, but his memory has tainted all wild game for her. This seemed a shame the first time I invited her for a duck dinner and she pushed aside the main course to concentrate on the acorn squash, brussel sprouts, and wild rice. She’s a big-boned woman with a rope of wheat-colored hair down her back and vulnerable blue eyes. She’s thinking, she says, of becoming a vegetarian.

12.1 Cover

Fiction

Mar 01 1989

A Flight of Bones

He can almost not sleep now. Nod, yes. Doze. Latch onto an easel or drop his head for minutes on a worktable, then squint, stare at the canvas. The figures, myriad infinitesimal hairs of color, fill a great eye reflecting them. Around the eye is nothing. He will get to that, yes. That’s always what he is to get to. He raises his head. The bright light behind sends his dark shadow before him, raises his head too. Then his hand makes a dark bone moving. He loves motion. He stands and his shadow rises into the painting, a dark blight, and totters, weak. His stomach is alive with sound. But he has even less desire to eat than sleep. His desire now is only to move. He wants to see motion, where it leads.