The Phenomenology of Shame
This story is currently not available online.
When she passes you in the hall, try to meet her eyes. Look away. Watch her smooth progress reflected in the window. She has not looked at you either. You notice her bruise-coolored shoes. The soft soles. How thin her ankles are. Back the surgery station, pretend to ignore the whispers. Check charts. Note alterations of the vital signs. Don’t participate by asking questions. You will learn enough to make a rough sketch of the facts…
Lilly, My Sweet
Found Text Series: Jean L. Clemens
Diary of Jean L. Clemens — New York, October 1900
Aki
This story is not currently available online.
Aki leans over the steaming bowl. The dashi is the color of tea. She watches several oil blobs float on the surface, gently change shape, combine, as she stirs the soup, as she touches her spoon to the tiny circles of green onion taht float to the top. The steam smells like nothing but heat. She sips fromt he spoon. It is without much flavor, but warm, and has an edge of smoke and metal. The taste after fish. She stares off, distracted by a sudden movement in the yellow leaves outside the kitchen window. They will be off the trees soon, she knows.
Magic and Hidden Things
This story is not currently available online.
The part of his job Creech used to like least was having to visiit Port-au-Prince. Four hours from New York, it may as well have been the dark side of the moon. Approaching the airport the plane would cruise low along the coast, over the pale eroded mountains and silted rivers. The jungle that once covered the country was nearly all gone. A few palm trees waved and nodded on the fringe around the runway of the airport, and above a nearby cluster of small cinderblock houses painted pink and lavender.
Poetry Feature: David Wojahn
Featuring the poems:
- Eggplants
- A Map
- Late Empire [This poem was featured as Poem of the Week (11/6/2008).]
Late Empire
The hours, ripe apples, hang. The pleasure boats
dapple the artificial lake, the women
shadowed by silk parasols, hands caressing water,
the men in powdered wigs, half-dozing at
the oars, and above the palace of Versailles
the globe airostatique, tasseled and swollen,
a Fabergé egg, labors to the sky
with its wicker basket cargo—a puzzled drake,
a rooster, a goat dubbed Climb-into-Heaven —
the brays and crowing wavering above
a hundred thousand pointing fingers, and the din
giving way to collective gasp, the one breath
inhaled, exhaled, novitiates all; the halcyon
days before the bells of sirens peal, blackout,
a night sky riddled with searchlights. But here?
The Screaming Blue Messiahs erupt from the stage.
Drums hiss at bass; the giant shaved-headed
singer strikes a pose, a chord, hulking
maniacally into The Wild Blue Yonder
amid a light show of dive-bombers—Stukas—careening
ever downward, feedback ricocheting
the walls. London, the Town and Country Club,
and I’ve lost you in a riot of green spiked hair,
slam dance, combat boots, the crowd awaiting
the next upheaval, the storming of the palaces
of the ancien régime … If I die in a combat zone
box me up and ship me home . Footage
of fire, Dresden and its million pounds of napalm,
the singer clubbing his guitar to wire
and splinters on the stage, and I’ve lost you
to the noise and tidal dance floor. I am
the destroyer, I am the des-troy-er.
A skinhead waves a broken bottle at
a scared Bengali kid, and the light show
bends their flight to slow-mo; the kid leans down,
hugs himself while his friends crowd by, his sleeve
in bloody shreds. The room speaks the language
of last summer’s recurring dream: the terrible
incinerating light has come, the dead
frozen black to the wheels of their cars, and I weave
a path among them to a house no longer standing,
call you in the way I call you now,
deaf to my own voice, and it’s now
I see you lifted skyward by the crowd,
passed with half a dozen others on raised arms,
weightlessly buoyed to the music’s stammer,
passed backward and forward across the dance floor,
a zigzag slither, until you finally come to rest,
earthbound again, on wobbly feet by a dull red
EXIT sign, and I’m threading my way through the faces
to reach you, shards of the guitar tossed snarling
to a sea of hands…. And when the balloon reaches
three hundred feet, an early fall wind propels it
beyond the lake, His Majesty’s deer park,
the ersatz peasant village of the Queen,
and when it blunders and falls to a field ten miles
away, imagine the terror-struck farmers and milkmaids,
lamenting the fall of the moon. Before them the goat,
no longer dazed, grazes on some clover;
the broken-winged rooster staggers in circles.
Now fear has raised a hundred pitchforks and scythes.
Now the fallen moon, and its cargo, must die.
How can we blame them? They set the field on fire.
Improving My Average
This story is not currently available online.
The prop plane labored up the Andes’ blue and white spine, at the mercy of blasts and vacuums. My scrambled eggs jittered in their dish, like the coarse yellow foam that storms leave on a beach. I had no intention of eating them: I was counting cities on my fingers, dividing in my head. After calculating backwards twice, I’d just gotten it straight. Being twelve years old, having lived in eight places, I’d inhabited each location of my childhood for on and four-eighths years, eighteen months, too long.
Past Useless
This story is not currently available online.
After the night the sheriff came ang got old Alfonso it was like he vanished from earth. Melvina didn’t seem like she missed him, and never mentioned his name except when me and Roy said, “Tell us about the time old Alfonso got after you with that knife, Melvina. Tell us about him Busting the door down with the axe. Tell about when he tried to choke you with a piece of clothesline. Tell about when ya’ll tied him to that chair in the yard. Tell…”
Poetry Feature: James Solheim
Featuring the poems:
- The Fear-of-Toadstools Lady
- On the Logic and Radiation of Our Love
- Against Biography
- Return of the Fear-of-Toadstools Lady
Poetry Feature: Walter Bargen
Featuring the poems:
- Reporting in the Off Season
- Walking on Air
- Transmissions
- Birding in Costa Rica
- Zeno’s Cinema
- At A Glance