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CONTENTS |
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| Andrea Hollander Budy | Giving Birth |
| Carol Moldaw | Wind Above the Weather Appraisal |
| Marilyn A. Johnson | Suspense More Death by Car |
| Beckian Fritz Goldberg | From Ancient Legends and Infidelities,
Ch. 3, "Perverse Muses" Bedtime Story |
| Mary Baine Campbell | It Does Not Matter So Much About the Exploding Suns |
| Robert Thomas | Quarter Past Blue |
| Dennis Schmitz | Base Metal |
| Elizabeth Tallent | The Lover as OED Diminutives |
| Kathryn Rantala | Blighty |
| D. Nurkse | Estrangement in the Capital The Dog |
| Jean Valentine | The Little, Faintly Blue Clay Eggs |
| Carl Phillips | Bright World, and Brightening If Polarized, If Filtered, Then More True |
| Mark Irwin | American Urn |
| Scott Withiam | How to End It |
| Betsy Sholl | When Cursing Fails |
| Kathy Fagan | Charm for What Looks Like Visitation |
| Tony Tost | Azaleas and So On |
| John Rybicki | Love Is the Heel that Knocks Hard Against the Floor |
| Rebecca Weaver | She Looked Up After Mouthing |
| Lee Upton | Get Off Your High Horse If the Walls Could Talk |
| Elizabeth Harrington | Poverty Days |
| Leonard Gontarek | Study / Trees Study / White |
| Kevin Prufer | The Rise of Rome |
| Ronald Wardall | Crossing the River Negro |
| Carol Potter | It |
| Charles Wright | Words Are the Diminution of All Things January II |
| Dennis Hinrichsen | Partial Glimpses of the Face of Jesus |
| Michele Glazer | 2 Blinds & a Bittern Lament |
| Poetry 2001: Four Review-Essays | |
| David Young | Sights and Sounds (Mekeel Mcbride, The Deepest Part of the River; Robin Behn, Horizon Note) |
| Pamela Alexander | Given the World (Jane Hirshfield, Given Sugar, Given Salt) |
| David Walker | The Heart's Affections (Thomas Lux, The Street of Clocks) |
| Martha Collins | Square Root of Two (Marilyn Nelson, Carver: A Life in Poems; Allen Grossman, How to Do Things with Tears) |
At twilight we walk each other
in the snowy park.
The leash yanks us apart.
Our trails mix crazily.
Haven't we always traveled
in a series of lunges
away from a missing center?
Something we can't name
obsesses us at the plinth
of the frozen birdbath,
and again under the belly
of Sherman's bronze horse.
Is there a secret passage
to squeeze through and be free
of the endless command?
We shout heel, our voice
slurs with longing, at last
we'll enter our own lit door
and there undo our studded collar,
mete out stale friskies, comb
matted hair, turn three times
on nothing, and whimper
in a dream whose ending
everyone knows but us.
--D. Nurkse
An hour before dusk on a Tuesday, mid-November--
sunstruck clouds with winter in them,
beeches, sycamores, white with it too.
Blue sky. Also
an aroma of blue
sky, bell-clear, hard as a river
in your lungs, which is why you're
breathless again, grateful,
as if it were the banks of the Seine
you strolled on and not
the mastodon back of the Midwest,
gray unraiseable thing like a childhood
slept through, and past.
On the horizon now a kind of golden
gate of sunset. To visit
means to both comfort and afflict,
though neither lasts long.
That charm of finches lifting from a ditch
can surprise you with a sound like
horselips, and paddle toward the trees
beautifully, small,
brown, forgettable as seeds,
but they, too, must sing on earth unto the bitter death--
--Kathy Fagan