ISSUES | spring 2003

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Featuring the poems: About the Nurse in Ob-Gyn Updike Arrives in Peoria, the City of Vowels The Alphabet Rome, Winter 1967   About the Nurse in Ob-Gyn The lobby is…    read more

These things happen: my husband asks me for a divorce, and the next morning the pond is gone. He comes rushing into the bedroom that he didn’t sleep in last night, where I lie facing the wall, finally asleep after crying my goddamn eyes out all night–can you imagine asking someone for a divorce?

Janie met the electrician Charlie Song in August. The AC adapter to her laptop had frayed, and the connection kept failing. Thus, she was forced to jiggle the plug until the current returned, at which points she would have to remain very still for many minutes at a time–she worked with her laptop on her actual lap, which was ridiculous, she knew, pathetic, but there you have it–lest the sadistic plug icon disappear and the machine revert to battery mode, which was supposed to last six hours but which ran down (and this Janie had timed) in seventeen and a half minutes.

The hedge hides the five-foot chainlink fence in Manny’s backyard. Yellow-green, green, dark and soft-looking at ten P.M. He planted it when Cesar started fifth grade, and now his boy is a senior. And a father!

Interviewer: You were born in the Midwest and moved to Thailand at age eleven. What effect did that experience have on you as a writer?

Powers: That’s such a huge question. It presumes I could somehow know what kind of writer I would have been had I not gone. But I know it affected my entire life – linguistically, intellectually, emotionally, culturally. I live in Bangkok from the age of eleven to sixteen, then came back to the States and finished high school in Illinois. But the years I spent overseas are so incredibly formative, the last years of childhood and the first years of young adulthood.

Featuring the poems: I Wonder Princess Superman’s Other Secret   I Wonder Diana, like any other girl with new clothes, cannot wait to try them on!                       -Wonder Woman #1 Question…    read more

One night, a year and a half into our Solomon Island Peace Corps service, James, the school’s vice principal, came to visit us. He announced himself near the front porch of our leaf-and-stick house. “Who-ee-oh,” he cooed.

Robby Travers, a boy of fourteen, took off his T-shirt and sneakers and stuck his toe in the pond at his grandparents’ farm. It was morning, and the sun was warm, but the shade of the willow tree and the water were cool. Robby hugged himself and hunched his shoulders–a reflex to cover his chest, which dipped in the middle like someone had taken an ice-cream scoop to it.

I had a sagebrush ‘fro and Led Zeppelin in my eight-track when the Sex Pistols came to town. The Kingfish, Baton Rogue, 1978. A friend had dragged me out, despite my scoffing. Punks, which I’d never seen, and English punks at that.

In the spring of 1968 a dozen progressive parents leagued up to drive out the principal of our county school. His name was Reilly. He was a choleric, paunchy man of sixty with a sneak’s gait who stank of liquor and often smoked two cigarettes at once. Not a single child in the school–not the most innocent first grader–had been spared Reilly’s thirty-inch cedar paddle, which he called Skipper.

Winner of the 2002 Editors’ Prize for Poetry. Featuring the poems An Occurrence of Grace at a Bartok Concert Riffs Thelonius Put Down Memory and Mozart The Insistence of Water…    read more

Featuring the poems: Road to the Mine Hilda Sarah Mine Explosion Shakes Windows in District School Removal of Bodies The Pail Bodies Forgiveness

The first time I heard about dieting, it was my mother who was doing it. In my eighth year, my mother, father and I lived in the town of Eku, in the middle of the Nigerian rain forest. My sister was away at boarding school. My parents were medical missionaries, and one of the things my mother did was visit village clinics, where she taught mothers about good nutrition, germ theory and the love of Jesus.

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen from hither and yon, and welcome to the Lee Chapel on the campus of historic Washington and Lee University. My name is Sybil Mildred Clemm Legrand Pascal, and I will be your guide and compass on this dull, dark and soundless day, as the poet says, in the autumn of the year.