ISSUES | fall 2003

My husband, Vince, a month shy of sixty-four, announces over dinner at a restaurant his intent to have cosmetic surgery. “So, should I go for the brow lift?” He pushes his receding hairline toward the lady in the booth behind him; his new wide-eyed stare reminds me of a retooled Wayne Newton. I am too stunned for words.

I stopped taking the heroin. At least for now. I made no vows. I didn’t go to a place where I paid people to tell me heroin is bad. I didn’t find eternal love or realize that drugs are Satan’s ambrosia. I just stopped.

Featuring the Poems: Into the Breach Her My Body Love Song My Walk   Into the Breach I want to tell them we can hear what they say. With coffee…    read more

The review in this issue of Sally Cline’s biography of Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald reminds me of one of my favorite minor works of literature. In 1945, five years after F.…    read more

How does one do justice to a woman who drove a Ford across the Hindu Kush, yet died in a fall from her bicycle near her home in Switzerland at the age of thirty-four?

Our town has no streets. Paths wind through it. We’re surrounded on three sides by a city residential area. Three long narrow streets are all that seperate us from the city. One side of our town ends at the edge of a city cemetary. I love our town.

This interview is not currently available online. Interviewer: The Hours has been terrifically successful. But I’m curious about what you were thinking when you first began the novel. If someone…    read more

What remains finally of the early afternoon in November 2001 when I was told that my daughter was shooting heroin? Before: girls’ voices tumbling down the stairs, the thrum of washing machine, an irritation at being interrupted, curiosity about who was in my house.

Lynn is taking her mother to the plastic surgeon’s office in Scottsdale, driving west on McKellips, past industrial lost and fields of dry weeds. Her mother, a small, pretty woman in an owl-print blouse, fold and unfolds a handkerchief in her lap as she stares out the window. Terrence, Lynn’s roommate, sits in the backseat, leafing through a brochure on plastic surgery.

1.            Ali and Frazier, 1975   From this moment on remember that everything they do, no matter what, is beautiful. Make no mistake. When Ali leans in with his left…    read more

To divide naturally. Used with into: The specimens fell into three categories.   Fallen already, the infallible world and its memory replaced by the fulcrum of words, the accumulation of…    read more

Fernando listened for the cow’s labored breaths. Something within him said a calf would be born that night and that the birth would be a hard one. His father had trained him to sense what was around him, to listen to his instincts. Instinct and a good pistol, his father had said, were the only things a man could count on.

A TMR Photo Essay Contest Winner. This essay is not currently available online. “This project explores a zone of peace, the village of Maladeg, in Lanao del Sur, Phillipines. Outside…    read more

That Sunday morning, when I told her, “Mrs. Wolff is dead,” my mother groaned, cocked her head, pursed her lips and said, in a voice barely loud enough to hear, “Che peccato.” The next day she lay in her bed, sick, calling to me in her Death Voice, “Andrew? Andrew? Sei tu, Andrew?