CONTENTS |
|
Denise Levertov: A Symposium | |
David Young | "To the Reader": The Speech of Mountains |
Marilyn Chin | Notes on "Hypocrite Women" |
Fred Marchant | "Life at War": Mere Regret |
Marianne Boruch | "An Embroidery: (IV) Swiss Cheese": Two Veils |
Arthur Sze | "The Malice of Innocence": Running Style Poetics |
Carole Simmons Oles | "In California During the Gulf War": Her Jerusalem |
**** | |
Bruce Beasley | Lord Brain |
Jennifer Atkinson | Seduction with Gold Pendant |
Richard Robbins | Glare Baptismal Font |
Eric Pankey | The Coordinates |
James Grabill | Cinnamon After a Long Struggle |
Timothy Liu | Anniversary Of Thee I Sing |
Angie Estes | Paramour Chez Nous |
Boyer Rickel | Coincidental |
Ellen Wehle | The Book of Hours: January Maid of Honor |
Kurt S. Olsson | Santa Barbara What Kills What Kills Us |
Rynn Williams | Islands Big Yard |
Michael Chitwood | Federal Reserve Notes |
Marilyn A. Johnson | Midway Vineland |
Will Wells | Spring Fever |
Elisabeth Murawski | Puella |
Jennifer L. Knox | Love Blooms at Chimsbury |
Julie Larios | God, Aware of Free Will, Asks a Favor |
Nance Van Winckel | No Possible Lead for the Whale Story and the Bureau Chief Passed Out |
Lu Yimin | American Women's Magazines The Ink Horse If You Can Die, Go Ahead and Die |
Karen Rigby | Poppies Vitruvian Man: Study of Two Figures |
David Baker | Post Meridian |
Regan Good | What I Saw and What It Said |
Kathleen Peirce | Slow Song |
Shirley Kaufman | from Translation |
Anmarie Trimble | Dream of Daily Bread |
Robert Gibb | Turtles Octopus |
Ander Monson | Astonish |
Liu Tsung-yuan | Exile in Ch'u Morning Walk |
Billy Collins | You, Reader |
Bruised purple leaves, soil made from blossom,
the strange yellow mushrooms that appear
overnight--it's as if she were standing on the edge
of a thought that would draw all the strands into one.
And he, after preparing the kindling, a perfect tower
over leaves and scrap paper--triage, consolidation--
goes through a door in the privet hedge,
and the light shifts.
The noise from the waterfront deck of The Dory--
that offhand banter--has become necessary to them
as darkness and clean linen. Intimacy has no hold
on the present, the garden, the fire where he places the grill
and the fish, gills falling open, the mouths, the articulate jaws
set, as if sewn. The short, rusted legs of the picnic table
have sunk in the sand.
The bruise will go from black to blue to yellow.
And the purple along the fault lines of the basil
is somewhere between the tomato vine and her vision
of what could have been--
the eyes of the fish turn opaque.
--Rynn Williams
Rubblework and bedrock,
The pillared shells drift across
That quadrant of sunlight
And dust in which heat is still
Murderous at four o'clock.
For hours now we've made
Our slow way through the zoo's
Sour tenements, past
The torpor of great cats, bears
Pole-axed by August.
Past each replicated landscape
We descended the stair
To stand watching turtles
Ferry their plates above
The salt tides of the blood--
Shells rifted and scarred
As if by glaciers, the soft parts
Of the mosaic pebbling their skin.
They seemed to me again
To have simply been uncovered:
Cobbles of the living rock
Left by those waters,
Their massed hearts, tidal,
Lifted into the sun.
--Robert Gibb