ISSUES | spring 2002

“Maybe you should move in with a man,” Derrick told his daughter Polly over the phone. She was having trouble with roommates. “There might be less intensity.”

Featuring the poems: Radium Girls, The Laboratory at Night, Marie Curie and Albert Einstein Hike in Engadine

The fancy apartment building near the shore, a gleaming white tower with black balconies, suddenly transforms into a pinched gray hulk scarred with graffiti. Single-family homes nearby start doing the…    read more

I’m ankle-deep in water, wearing Dad’s new rubber duck boots. Mom’s lying alone in their bed, blanket up to her ears. “Mom,” I say, “there are nine reasons you shouldn’t commit suicide. Number one: It’ll mean you’re a quitter. Number two: Dad will have won.”

Featuring the poems: St. Veronica’s Trials, The Home Arts, Elegy

Interviewer: What is your definition of a short story?

Cisneros: I don’t know what the definition of a short story is, and I don’t even care to answer that question. That’s something somebody in academia would think about. I just want to tell a story, and if people listen, and if it stays with you, it’s a story.

I got disoriented on the prairie. Most of the roads were gravel, and only a few had signs. Nobody up there needed them. Tourists usually stuck to the interstate on…    read more

Ellen Morgan drummed her fingers on the steering wheel, keeping them light, not gripping the hot vinyl because the very act of expressing the tension that this endless traffic generated…    read more

Kenny rides the horse, a sophomore in my tenth-grade Language Arts class, does not know how to write but loves to draw. When I assign an in-class writing exercise on…    read more

It feels right naming people for what they are—brigands, some of them, pussies, most of them—even though I sometimes get my ass whipped for naming people after things when I…    read more

Featuring the poems: X-Men, Quotients, Hypnosis, Frank Lloyd Wright & The Last Famished Mosasaur, Astronomy 101, Road Trip

Featuring the Poems: And What If I Spoke Of Despair, Be Still My Heart, Gate C 22, 3 A.M. Feeding

[This text is also available online as part of our TextBox anthology.]   Tokyo, 1979 Etsuko Nagatomi loved all three of her children, but she did not love them all…    read more

SABURO’S FATHER belonged to that generation which, having survived the war, rebuilt Japan from ashes, distilling defeat and loss into a single-minded focus with which they erected cities and industries…    read more

ROY GOT UP AT FIVE to start cooking for the firemen. He had been getting up at dawn for weeks now anyway, ever since the last seizure, but usually he…    read more