The Marsh King’s Daughter
At eighty she is almost always in pain. Each night she feels the small bones of her back like fish in black water, twisting and blind at the end of her nerves. Some nights she falls into something...
View ArticleA Change of Season
Where pasture slopes to river, something that is almost light rises and sheets into air. Charley Morton’s cows wade and emerge glistening with it. They are transformed though I can’t say how. They are...
View ArticleA Suit Our Brother Could Have Worn
In a family loyal to the ghost of our home state, there’s always the renegade cousin. Old aunt who retreats at Christmas. The turncoat niece. Infantries of nephews threatening to secede. And then to...
View ArticleComet
When I answered my father, “A ball of ice, dust, and gas orbiting the sun elliptically,” he was most my father then— he 40, me 9 and momentarily hooked at perigee: he knew I was close but that I’d...
View ArticleWar Horse
Plumed like Bucephalus, his yellow teeth piano keys, his massive haunches missile launchers, he hauls the artillery of thrill across the practice grounds that shake beneath his too-familiar tread. His...
View ArticleParkchester Playground
Blur of swings against the infant sky, then brick, then sky again: two chains and a seat twisting to helix and unwinding so high above the restraining bar, to jerk and plummet back, a slat hung above...
View ArticleBadlands (I)
At three a boy came down a hill on his bike. He looked down to see you carved in his left thigh. There were horses there, five bands together, valleyed, bathing in red ponds. He couldn’t feel them...
View ArticleThe Best American Poetry Gets More Ithidrial by the Hour
A Review of Jonathan Williams’ Jubilant Thicket and Adrienne Rich’s The School Among the Ruins Jubilant Thicket: New & Selected Poems by Jonathan Williams, Copper Canyon Press, Port Townsend,...
View ArticleNo Ideas But in People
A Review of New Books by Cathy Smith Bowers, Marilyn Kallet, Diane Gilliam Fisher, and Jane Mayhall A Book of Minutes by Cathy Smith Bowers. Oak Ridge, TN: Iris Press, 2004. 81 pp. $13 paper. ISBN...
View ArticleTo Disenchant and Disintoxicate
A Review of Patrick Bizarro’s Every Insomniac Has a Story To Tell Every Insomniac Has a Story To Tell: Poems by Patrick Bizarro. Greenville: Independent Press, 2004. 74 pages. ISBN: 0-9722190-6-4....
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