ISSUES | summer 2006

I found a large brown boulder one day, and I decided to bring it in. I put it in our living room and then, to please my wife, swept up the trail of dirt it had left on our carpeting. The big brown boulder sat there like it owned the place. I could almost see it cross its arms. Its top was pointy; it had a big bulging belly and a squat base.

Featuring the poems: Round Trip, Fireballs of the Eucharist, Still , License

Rosa’s cat was short-haired, black and white, with half its left ear torn away and a tail that twitched when the cat meant to do evil. If Rosa failed to notice the tail, the cat might rake claws across her hand as she petted him. She fancied herself a cat lover, but this animal led her to thoughts of betrayal.

“I am looking for the bigger, deeper, more sustaining project. But so far all I have are inklings. One is in a mental file called ‘the death of the imagination….'”

The best writers don’t always stand in easy proximity either with “what’s happening” or with their own natural subjects or voices. What they do best isn’t necessarily either fashionable or–contrary to theories about following one’s bliss–fun.

Al-Rashid Street is an old colonnaded road of shops in the heart of Baghdad. At its entrance sits the historic British Residency, where the influential British administrator and diplomat Gertrude Bell, the famous ‘Daughter of the Desert’ and ‘uncrowned queen of Iraq,’ once lived and literally drew Iraq onto the map.

They had lived a clothed life. An accident had changed that. But what was an accident? It was just a word. There was no reason at all that what had happened shouldn’t have happened….[H]ere the two of them sat, Drayton and Sarah Maguire, naked, wilted.

I’ve always believed in signs and will do almost anything to predict the future. Often the first to pry open my fortune amid the remains of a Chinese dinner, I inhale the smell of the cookie itself as prophecy: that honeyed shellac, the faintest bitter whiff of lemon.

When Deborah said, “Jason, you know I’m a little in love with you,” he pretended not to hear. Deborah was twenty-one. She was a tattooed and bejeweled art student currently taking a painting class with him.

Featuring the poems: If, Darwin’s Dog, Taking the Cure, Maldonado, My Dear Fox

Featuring the poem:

Lineage

As my U.N. flight from Islamabad taxis to a stop at Kabul International Airport, I see Masood and Wahob waiting for me behind the wire gate of the parking lot….Together the two of them took me for four hundred dollars the last time I was there.

In [Schiele’s portraits] he rendered tortured emotional states against isolated, blank backgrounds. All of his stylized portraits reflected his own inner world. In fact, Egon Schiele’s art was a means to learn about his life, his loves, his sexuality.