ISSUES | winter 2003

Behind building 400, I watched an elderly man in a very worn, untucked button-down shirt and a pair of thin, light blue shorts shuffle around the back of a delivery truck.

Featuring the poems: Intercession to Saint Brigid, Mist and Fog, Song of Earth and Sky

It had been like this for the past few nights, breathlessly still and overpoweringly hot, as though the earth’s long, circular motion through space had been suspended, perhaps through a kind of cosmic lassitude, and that [sic] now the discouraged sphere was drifting slowly downwards through dense, sultry darkness toward a forced landing in the sun’s great bin of ashes.

Featuring the poems: Sergeant Crocker Newton Recollects the Return of Thane Gould to Endicott, Massachusetts, in the Winter of 1977 Catboat A Few Local Names of the Double-Crested Cormorant Dogs…    read more

It was said that boys should go on their first sea voyage at the age of ten, but surely this notion was never put forth by anyone’s mother. If the bay were to be raised one degree in temperature for every woman who had lost the man or child she loved at sea, the water would have been boiling, throwing off steam even in the dead of winter, poaching the bluefish and herrings as they swam.

The women of the office gather around Pilar’s desk to play Who Has the Worst Children. The higher up they are in the office hierarchy, the more offensive and shocking their offspring. Allison, Pilar’s boss and the CEO of the company, has four-year-old twin boys who dumb Hershey’s syrup on the couch and call each other “shit-head.”

“Hello,” said Bobby Houston. He was slight, with wire-rimmed glasses over pale, almost white-blue eyes. He had a nervous tic — his left hand jabbed out. She could see through his skin.

Ofelio Campos stood at the edge of the eleventh sloor, dreaming of beds. He thought of showroom floors and king-sized mattresses. He thought of sultanish waterbeds spotted like leopards. He thought of pillows. He thought of freshly washed sheets, crips from the dryer, of a comforter he once slept under in a Las Vegas motel, folding him in like the wings of a bird.

For hours now Dobrin has been begging Stassi to stop it, shut up, are you trying to make her mad? “Put those down,” he hisses, whispering, though his mother lags too far behind to hear.

My father is a storyteller. He doesn’t even know he is telling stories; he is simply talking, and what he has to say has a beginning, middle and end. It suits his temperament because he likes to be the center of attention. He often repeats the same stories — you could say he has a repertoire.

“We don’t wanna go,” the boys said at the same time. It was the first Saturday of the summer, and they were salting a slug under the pecan tree out back.

Kazu Takamura sat upright on the cream-colored leather couch, which took some effort as the couch was wide and deep, designed to relax people. But Kazu Takamura was not relaxed. He glanced nervously at the secretary again. She sat at a computer, her eyes glued to the screen. She had told him it would only be a few minutes, but that had been fifteen minutes ago.

Featuring the poems: Seeds, Deluge, The Freedom of the City [This poem was featured as Poem of the Week for 10/28/2008], Island of Miracles

Something that Bill Bradley asks Tobias Wolff in this issue’s interview calls to my mind an embarrassing moment in The Missouri Review‘s past. Wolff’s new novel, Old School, concerns, among…    read more

Interviewer: In your new novel, Old School, your narrator claims — truthfully, it seems to me — “No true account can be given of how or why you became a writer…” However, I wonder if you could tell me a little bit about the course of events that led you to pursue a career as a writer.

Wolff: It was, I suppose, a tendency in my nature, to some extent encouraged by my reading, and at one point by the example of my brother, Geoffrey, who is seven and a half years older than I.