ISSUES | spring 2006

[I]f every admirable result from setting a story in the future or from using images of the fantastic or extrapolative concepts isn’t science fiction — because it’s too good — then all that’s left to represent the label are the failed attempts to use those motifs. So of course the genre is contemptible.

Amali felt the gaze of the other girls studying her as Chamila joined the class. It took all of her concentration to keep a fixed gaze on her notebook, on the neat script of the English letters making up her name. The ‘A’ came up to a determined point that she liked. In English, her name announced itself on the page with strength, like a ladder climbing skyward. In Sinhala, her name began in endless loops, constantly circling themselves, leading nowhere.

One crystalline spring evening in London I heard from a woman who declared, “I have reason to believe you’re my biological father.” Speaking long distance from Los Angeles, she said she had been born there on December 24, 1964. As she told me the precise time of her birth, her weight and the color of her eyes and her hair, the conversation assumed the sort of sinking inevitability that attaches itself to events that you realize you’ve been waiting for, half in dread, half in hope, for decades.

One of the major themes of this prize issue is winning not money or power but, more importantly, a sense of place and belonging. Understanding where one is, fitting in, finding roles, connecting with others and with the rest of nature–these are primordial themes not just in literature but in all of art.

Winner of the 2006 Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize for Poetry

Featuring the poems: Re: Vitruvian Man; Speculum; Recoil; To an Older Sibling, Miscarried

He was gentle toward his mother and sisters. Toward girls we met in the neighborhood, his spirit shifted like waves on water, half-shy, half-friendly. That he could force a girl to do something she didn’t want to do appeared unlikely… At age eighteen, Roland had lived his entire life in a country where men and women were not born equal, socially or politically. He spoke with a vehemence he had not grown into. “I’m the man,” he insisted.

Featuring the poems: Happiness, Only Child, My Parents’ Sex Life, What She Wanted, Babies, Hospital Days

Shuhei was stuck in the odd position of both protecting and despising his friend, or his neighbor, so that at school he would stand up between the moping Hideo and the bigger and rougher boys, who numbered as many as four and would half-encircle him, and when Shuhei intervened he had to withstand the shoves of four pairs of arms against his iron chest. Yet when it was only the two of them, Shuhei, despite himself, would occasionally find himself overcome with annoyance and would push the boy down. This will teach you! he would say as the boy fell to the ground.

The size of a human being is at the center of all possible sizes in the universe. This amazing assertion challenges not only the centuries-old philosophical assumption that humans are insignificantly small compared to the vastness of the universe but also the logical assumption that there is no such thing as a central size. Both assumptions are false…

Featuring the poems: Giving Out, That Thing You Can Never Have, Coplas/Verses, Damage