Poetry Feature: Michael McGriff
Featuring poems from Landscapes with Origins:
- [In the break room]
- [Against my will]
- [The slow child, the small child]
- [Worm of concession]
- [This father and daughter]
- [Midwinter: she doesn’t reach]
[In the break room]
In the break room
the mill holds us
in its mouth:
the graveyard shift
and its floodlights:
Sally’s buying a new trailer:
Tony’s truck’s about paid off:
a certain stillness
between us:
Jake’s back in jail
for getting rowdy:
we are among the chosen:
someone’s daughter
stays up all night
eating her own hair:
a woman on 3rd Street
applies makeup to a corpse
she’s recently washed:
a cop drifts over a fog line
in his Crown Victoria:
the foreman’s girlfriend
stands in the corner:
Todd thinks she looks
like a country singer:
the way her hair shines
like a bare bulb
over broken glass:
she’s new here:
her painted fingernails:
she rests her hand
on the animal of sleep
and it leans
against her leg:
in fifteen minutes
she’ll crawl up a ladder
into a metal cage
where hot sheets of plywood
will shoot out
one after another
like a satanic card trick,
and she’ll guide them
by the edge, in midair,
and let them drop
to the sorter,
until she closes her eyes
just long enough
to catch the rhythm
of her own breath
and float upon the waters
where the animal of sleep
winds through the cattails:
she’ll feel the calm
of starlight subtracted
from daylight:
then a sheet of veneer
will tear open her face:
the mill holds us
in its mouth:
a corpse’s hands
are placed together:
the cop drives his cruiser
into the river:
which will soon fill
with a daylight
our curses may
or may not
ever reach.
Poetry Feature: Christina Hutchins
Featuring the poems:
- Confessions of a Tactile Kleptomaniac
- A Way Back to Life
- A Traveler is Met By Shapes of the World
- Interregnum [featured as Poem of the Week, July 29, 2008]
Interregnum
I was born wizened. Rasp of first breath,
I took the tinders of my parents’ gazes and flinted
a honeyed flame. Before knowledge of cake or wood,
before even I was plated with a name, there were
cracklings and pleasings, wetly offered smiles and gasp :
I was old.
I took my place and a heat
leapt up, not mine,
but I tended it.
Drinklings, we are born to this necessity. To help. Helpless,
we snort the atmosphere, lunge toward milk, love. Eyes clouded,
lungs dewy with night, we emerge from the close cabin rocking
to a day already underway. Once I was emperor
of a body not my own, yet I craved the broken levee.
Haven, if it is haven, gives.
The swimmer passes
her piped body toward
the sting of light.
Ever after, the tear ducts remember. There was a beach
belonged to my mother’s and my father’s Sundays. We walked there.
Sometimes I was between them, holding both their young hands.
Then she turned old and he was infirm,
rotting from within. I was the shunt of wreckage,
yellow-blue flame, versicoloured
mermaid of the rocks,
fitted
for the abyss.
One by one, I took from my fingertips the limpet shells
I had worn like small roofs over touch. I stacked them, so many
tunics on the beach. My cinder cones.
Plum-hot the anvil, lava, the volcano’s rise, ours
is a sky of yellow crumb and ash. Amorphous, still I am consuming,
yea and nay, and consumed,
but shaken loose: empress
of undertone, perilous foam,
creek in its natal dark.
Put on the Petty
The full text of this essay is not currently available online.
After Eric and I survived an F2 tornado in Tulia, Texas, I thought we’d live forever. We rode out the tornado in a high-profile SUV-precisely the wrong kind of shelter-and after we’d crashed into a brick wall and ducked under a one-hundredtwenty-knot jet that screamed through the blown-out windows, it seemed as if the Angel of Death had roared, in a breath choked with debris, and then fled, leaving us alone and lucky.
Never Trust a Man Who —
The full text of this story is not currently available online.
In the sopping-wet spring of 1995, Sylvia rode the bus to and from Old Mountain more times than she cared to count. Her twin brother, Drago, was in Kyustendil, doing his military service, and she felt obliged to visit her mother twice as often as usual. When she had been a student, she’d caught any bus she could, usually from Poduene Station, which was a filthy place, thick with fumes and overrun by dogs, full of stalls hawking cheap underwear and overripe vegetables.
Arctic Summer
The full text of this story is not currently available online.
Even today, I am unsure about a lot of things. I am unsure about what exactly happened to me in Qik that summer, about how much it had to do with the strange beauty of the place-strange enough to put a spell on you. Or how much it had to do with her, or with me.
Poetry Feature: Jude Nutter
Winner of the 2007 Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize for Poetry.
The Insect Collector’s Demise [featured as a Poem of the Week August 21, 2008]
How to Use a Field Guide
Growing Up in Bergen-Belsen: The Chrysalis
A Conversation with Charles Baxter
The full text of this interview is not currently available online.
This generation takes in more information daily than my parents and grandparents ever had to. With the Internet and the screen culture, we’re all living in a period of data smog. Part of what it means to write a story now involves noticing that environment. I’m really interested in the way people do not pay attention to certain things anymore. People listen much more selectively than they once did. It’s a feature of our time that you see people walking down the sidewalk talking on the phone. That’s amazing! They’re on the phone! These things remain a feature of our lives that our grandparents would never have believed.
A Review of Seven First Poetry Books
Featuring reviews of:
Barter by Monica Youn
My Soviet Union by Michael Dumanis
Floating City by Anne Pierson Wiese
Standing in Line for the Beast by Jason Bredle
Sister by Nickole Brown
The Man Suit by Zachary Schomburg
Frail-Craft by Jessica Fisher.
The Mechanics of Being
The full text of this essay is not currently available online.
He confessed everything then, eager, like a serial killer at last confronted with evidence of his crime, to have the details of his awful secret revealed. And when pressed about why he hadn’t said anything sooner, he mentioned his master plan: he would make his sight get better by ignoring, as much as possible, the fact that it was getting worse.
Whistling in the Louvre
The full text of this story is not currently available online.
The smell of insanity: acrid, piss-logged wood. The only way they’ll get rid of it, she told us, is to rip up the flooring. The butch could have done it, too, with her bare hands. A jangle of keys, the reassuring click of a tumbler, and we were back in the hall. My wife, with concern in her voice: But one got used to it, right? No, you never do. Twelve years later, sitting on the hospital lawn, I catch a whiff of it in the breeze. I prefer waiting outdoors. Besides, the sun feels good on my face. Fall is in the air. A typical July morning in New Hampshire.