ISSUES | spring 2000

In between things, Parker slept with Rachel. He kept telling himself he wouldn’t do it, even insisted, sometimes out loud, that the mere thought of doing it was completely out of the question.

The sight of the girl’s short neck made me look away. A wide, stocky neck shaped like an overturned flower pot, with no space for a string of pearls. I had always been proud of the slender stems on which the women in our family carried their heads.

The Cat Scan
The Bad Caddie
Pan-Olympic Mid Life
Friday Night Fights
Elegy

I took a course in Modern American literature in 1975, taught by a man named Walter Slatoff. I dragged along four friends who had little interest in literature but indulged me for some reason that I forget. Among them was the young man who would become my husband, who remembers how Slatoff was about to read an exercept from my paper in the last moments of his final lecture but ran out of time.

Featuring the Poems:  Mooncalves Freemartin  [This poem was featured as Poem of the Week, January 15, 2008] Dismantling the Cave Gate Stephen Bishop’s Grave Cave Mummies Broken Country

All I’m going to do is talk. That’s right–you’re going to pay me to sit here and talk to you.

Two hours after he exposed himself to her, the girl made a scene at supper. It was just what Wilder had hoped she’d do.

How To Go Home
A Victorian Construction
Totem and Taboo
Trostky’s Hand
Swamp Thing

Excerpt:

They were suspended over the Ohio River. It was nighttime, and she couldn’t see the water. There was a blinking cell-phone tower on the opposite shore, and her lover was driving toward it.

Winner of the 1999 Editors’ Prize for Fiction THE FEELING OF MY FAT on me—and wanting to get rid of it. Seeking to sell it, get something for my fat.…    read more

If I was a painter this is how I would paint the Napa Valley: not like those gallery scenes of mustard in bloom or harvest-ripe fruit, but this ghostly silver secret landscape, the vines dormant and white with frost, the moon full, jackrabits scattering across the roadway before me like mercury beads.

I feel that the work of poetry is like making potato latkes. Every poem is like a potato latke, that’s all it is. On the other hand, it’s the most important thing a person can do. I suppose it’s because I believe poetry’s work is to uncover a genuine or authentic human identity, an identity even prior to childhood. It’s like the Zen question: What was your face before you were born? I think poetry tries to answer that, to come to terms with an identity that’s ancient and eternally fresh because it is so ancient.

Winner of the 1999 Editor’s Prize in Poetry   Flashlight Stories I.   The women in this family play pinochle, smoke, toss back salted nuts with the dregs of their…    read more