ISSUES | winter 2008

There was some thing spellbinding about it, peering down the vast well of time at Loeka’s small, puckered face. While extract ing a tissue sample for analysis, it wasn’t uncommon for any one of us to sing to Loeka sweetly or to talk to him as if he were an obedient child.

If I had to watch a boy’s throat instead of his face, how would I know when he was finished speaking? Even if his voice had trailed off, maybe he was only pausing to collect his thoughts. Without eye contact, a face-to-face conversation was no better than a phone call. I wondered how my friends could read advice like this and not feel hopeless. I gave up on the makeup because I couldn’t close my eyes and still see where the eye shadow should go. Short of making a life-size copy of the diagram and holding it up to my face like a stencil, the whole maneuver was physically impossible.

She asked him if he would love her forever, and he knew that in the brief moment that he hesitated, not blurting yes, forever he would love her, she got sad. Years ago her parents had divorced, and she had wanted her family to go back to normal. en both her parents had remarried. Her brother was married, her sister divorced twice and remarried. She constantly wondered if anyone stayed married and happy.

The creature screeched just as it hit the ice, and he thought he felt the collision there on the shore where he leaned against a knobby sycamore. Then the thing skidded, and there was a little trail of blood.

Featuring reviews of: The Unpossessed by Tess Slessinger All the Sad Young Literary Men by Keith Gessen The Lazarus Project by Aleksandar Hemon The Collected Stories by Leonard Michaels Dictation: A Quartet by Cynthia Ozick.

It’s the last round of the fourteenth annual Presbyterian United Bible Quiz, and Freddy Hansook Chung of Glendale, California, is in the lead with 7,300 points — 2,100 ahead of second place. Staring into the dark auditorium where his parents, Mr. and Mrs. Young Min Chung, are sitting with their well-worn Bibles and sending telepathic cheers to their Young American Hope, Freddy takes a deep breath and locks his fingers over the rubber buzzer pod, which by now is as hot and pliant as a woman’s breast, or what he imagines a woman’s breast must feel like. The buzzer even has a nipple, a Phillips-head screw working a dent into his palm with each push, and twice Freddy has given it a gentle squeeze for good luck.

Featuring the poems: Four Games Played While Riding the Bus Frames Kansas City The Heartland Bay Window

“Hard-hearted Hannah,” Patsy called her. The vamp of Savannah, G-A. But Hannah wasn’t from Savannah, she was from Wisconsin. And Patsy stopped calling her that just about the time that Ted began to sleep with her.

During the height of her career, fashion illustration was dismissed by fine-art elitists as trivial or at best a “Cinderella art.” They claimed that the work did not spring from inspiration but rather from the client’s pocketbook and that it was ephemeral — timely rather than timeless. Yet over the decades the aesthetic beauty of the genre has withstood fine-art scrutiny, and fashion illustration is today recognized for its importance as a historical record of a society and style as well as for its popularity among collectors and connoisseurs.

Featuring the poems: Repetition Complaint Failed Sketch

Featuring the poems: The Ringmaster The Contortionist The Clown The Fortune-Teller The Acrobat The Magician The Roustabout The Audience   The Magician Stars on his fingernails, sky in his hair,…    read more

I grew up four miles outside of a town of six hundred, and by the time I was thirteen, I knew most of those people. My father knew all of them and others for miles around, men and women, black and white, and when he met a person he did not know, it was not long before he made a connection with someone that they both knew. In fact, most of the talk in the country was about people, and not just the living or the recently dead. There was a kind of web, a legending and a curiosity that enclosed us. I take that with me, and I imagine that the longer cultural habit does go back to Chaucer, but not just through books and not just through language.

So remember — the guy who paid for the American Revolution went broke in real estate speculation, inspiring the bill that will keep you out of jail when you go broke. Be happy.

Here you are: the same person I have loved for so long. Same thick, framed glasses, brown hair, blue eyes. Same sweet and devilish face, oval like an egg. And now, a moment later, you are different. You are crying, and I hold you, trying to shield your body with mine, trying not to cry because I cannot quite understand what is happening. I do not want to go to the dark places with you. You are now living the thing you feared most, this worst thing, a tumor-like growth, whispered in your ear, and maybe in a sick way you were ready for the news, expectant without realizing.