ISSUES | spring 2009

Reviews of America’s Constitution: A Biography, by Akhil Reed Amar; Christianity and the Constitution, by John Eidsmoe; The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court, by Jeffrey Toobin;…    read more

For every living person on Earth, I wonder, how many dead people are in the ground? Do they care that we walk around on top of their heads? Do our ancestors follow us around throughout the day, and do they shake their heads at us when we repeat their mistakes?

I can only figure out who I am by projecting myself onto my dogs. It occurred to me on day, when performing this exercise in self-definition on my cocker spaniel, that my own, my family’s and my country’s history of interaction with cocker spaniels encapsulates our changing relationship with nature, with science, with mortality.

This is a culture that does not honor the arts, increasingly does not honor the arts, does not honor literacy, does not honor intelligence, does not honor contemplation. That’s what we’re swimming in. I think you have to find whatever it is that drove you to begin writing in the first place, and you have to feed it.

Ruby and the Alarm Bird Washing my father’s hands Translations Turnstile

Featuring the poems: Octopus Anemone Oceans Melt (featured as Poem of the Week, June 2, 2009)   Melt If I could enter what I long for, true coursing, blown North,…    read more

Enough The Good Day The Music is Going Great in Both Directions In Bed with Janet Encore Pleasure Vandalizing My Sister’s House

June told her mother about this woman, how she waited in her front yard in order to speak with her father, and how she’d smile with her “big fat lips.” But the mother only laughed and said, “Well, aren’t you the little spy?”

I was eight years old and just strong enough to slip a shot over the lip of the rim when I heaved it just right. I don’t know how CJ missed me standing at the edge of the playground’s blacktop, crook of my right arm squeezing a basketball, but he did. I wanted to hide or run past them and up to my parents’ apartment, but I ended up backing up to the fence and sitting on my heels like I was watching TV.

It was snowing when I left the tavern. A couple of inches had accumulated during the hour or so I’d been inside eating a fish sandwich, washing it down with a local IPA. I had just come back crom Portland, Oregon. My daughter, Gabrielle, had died there four years before.

Time passed, and Peter didn’t know what to do. He’d never liked long hugs, not even form women, and this was becoming one of the longest of his life.

Finally I figured out [an angle] and give it to the extremely morose man who took money from my children whenever they wanted to catch goldfish in his sad little inflatable pool…. I thought about how teh clientele had changed in the past few years and about what that might mean for the city and the country and my character. I gave him an apartment in the building where my Mandarin teacher lived. Then I gave him a history and waited for it to come back and bite him in the ass, the way all our histories do.

…For these reasons, literature can sometimes describe highly charged events more compellingly and with a truer sense of emotion than history or even eyewitness narratives. By admitting to its own fiction and slanted reconstruction, literature paradoxically serves as the best of witnesses.