ISSUES | spring 2004

After six months at language school in northern Ethopia, we finally moved south to our first mission station. Father, whose career as a doctor had been on hold, was posted to a hospital near the town of Soddo, in Wallayta district. There, we occupied a real house instead of a temporary apartment.

Recently, after having reread the contents of this Editors’ Prize Issue for TMR, I took a break by turning on the TV for a half hour of channel surfing.

She was remembering a time she and her husband had taken a child to the circus. There had been clowns and animals and pink-shirted bareback riders, and the little girl had decided she would herself become a circus performer when she grew up.

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Featuring the poems: Horses The Rest of Us To The Reader The Last Supper   Horses Still, the horses are beautiful and their grace keeps me occupied. -Linda Hogan We…    read more

Instead of the gold-plated onion domes Josie had hoped for, the view from their room revealed only the grimy, cement backside of the Oktyabrskaya metro station, where a few merchants had set up tables selling flimsy newsprint magazines bearing pictures of naked women.

Suzanne and I were nearing the end of a journey together that had taken us overland through Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India. On the front steps of a hotel in New Delhi I waited for a taxi among shirtless, mostly sleeping baggage men.

My mother and husband died nineteen days apart, and the next time I put on shoes it was four months later. The cable was disconnected, yellowing newspapers were logjammed on the porch and Brisket and Chervil had hunkered down with Sonya next door in the name of reliable food.

Featuring the poems:  My Father’s Brain Lucky Day The Three Temptations of My Father The Adirondacks Black Olives

On Friday my wife, Catrine, kicked me out of the house. On the following Thursday she called me at my room in the Budget Inn and said, “I want you to come with me to the Lizzie Borden House and Bed and Breakfast in Fall River, Massachusetts.”

On the Friday that they received the money from his father, Harrut had gone for a swim. He got off work in the early afternoon, stripped to his boxer shorts and dove, crashing through some shallow waves, into the sea.

Wilbur Reston was already in the intensive care unit of the tiny Florida hospital when I arrived at 2:30 A.M. I had been doing a series of temp jobs after having completed my medical residency at New York City’s Bellevue Hospital and now found myself in a small town on the Gulf Coast.

Oaklawn dwarfed them, white and haughty as a plantation, four tall stories with flags waving out front. Police directed traffic around the building, blowing their whistles in its shadow. His father drove an entirely red car that was eleven years old.

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Featuring the poems: Field Planted to Winter Grass The Return Trill and Mordent Mandorla