ISSUES | winter 1997

  Here on these flat fields I remember napalm, that lavish charcoal lighter of a fat man’s barbecue. I’m like a pitcher with eyes in the back of his head…    read more

  Out here, cactus is the skyline, a hundred miles of flat. Turn in a circle and never know you’re back, except for the neighbor’s ranch, barns like specks of…    read more

This story is no currently available online. One Saturday morning when my brother and I were ten, our family television set spontaneously combusted.

  Clouds over Long’s Peak, the sky blue everywhere but there, and when I glance away and back, they’re gone. Imagine: I make the highest mountain disappear by tipping my…    read more

This “Found Text” feature is not currently available online. Not many years ago there lived in a certain city a person of the name of Henry O Donell. In figure…    read more

  I remember the first tub of red racers I saw in a walled shed in Arkansas, down by the Ouachita. My uncle led us there when I was nine,…    read more

This poem is not currently available online.

This story is not currently available online. Nell sleeps with her hand on her mother’s breast until Mrs. Pope comes in, carrying chickens to pluck.  Nell is put outside.  She…    read more

  I was looking for a horse, but there was no horse, only the feed barn and above it the purple meat of sky: the smell of birch smoke and…    read more

This story is not currently available online. A letter was lying on Nimei’s desk.  She was puzzled because the envelope did not give a return address.  The postmark showed the…    read more

  It is 1975, the year before my parents stop speaking. Old, rabbinical, Uncle Leo takes his glasses off to gesture, while on my shoulder my brother softly dozes. At…    read more

This poem is not currently available online.

Interviewer: How did your background, growing up on a Kentucky dairy farm in the forties and fifties, contribute to your becoming a writer? Mason: It was a somewhat isolated social…    read more

    If  you think ground squirrels are fun,                             wait till you see a coyote.   I’d never say that to grandsons, but even coyotes have to eat. So what…    read more

The scent of petrol hit my nose on my first day of school in Israel in 1959. I was a ten year old used to the processed smells of an…    read more

  Always, it seems, it has been like this: the phone cradled on my mother’s shoulder, her too-loud boyfriend laugh. When she whispers fork and spoon windchimes jangle on fish…    read more

This story is not currently available online. On weekday mornings in Madrid any number of musicos go down into the Metro to play.  Toni Valero plays the guitar at the…    read more

  Those puffy clouds in the Rocky Mountains could be gunfire, another time and place. Before this planet spins us back home to the plains, dozens will die by rockets…    read more

  All day we watched it—my mother, brother, and I—the relentless wrath, the furious downpour of God. Our zucchini plants torn loose from the soil, lumber and stovepipe roiling in…    read more

This poem is not currently available online.

  Sometimes my bones hum like Bunyan’s must have; world turned vassal to my will, whole cornfields swaying at my footsteps, thistles fleshed into fruit. Then I think I could…    read more

This story is not currently available online. The trough in the landscape was what fooled you–made the windmill appear to lie just over a hill, when the real distance might…    read more

On a bucket outside the Saint Nowhere feed barn, cold, stolen apple juice dribbling down my chin, I looked out toward the madrones along the coast. Above my head hung…    read more

This poem is not currently available online.

  My wife’s green eyes are jade and rainbows. With horsehairs dipped in oils, she brushes corrals and cattle on canvas, the burnt sienna sand and pastures of our boots.…    read more

This poem is not currently available online.

She said, “You have no character. I see right through you.” She leaned across the table, closer to me, her eyes glittering a little, as if she had just told…    read more

This story is not currently available online. The dog was a mixture of god-knows-how-many breeds, but the vet had told them he had at least some rottweiler blood.  You could…    read more

High atop a playground’s fuchsia frog a girl spits pomegranate seeds into the mammoth armful of meadow. The field troubles her with longing and culmination of longing: the yellow spikeweed…    read more