ISSUES | spring 2007

Granddaddy Zoby visited us exactly one time each year. It was always at the end of summer, he and my grandmother driving fifteen miles an hour below the speed limit, backing up the Hampton Roads Tunnel, leaving a path of stalling traffic in their wake.

All through my twenties, those playful, makeshift years when nothing seemed serious or settled, my friendship with David was the most important constant. I was building what I thought of as my teaching career, those young days, and I moved to a new place every two or three years: I worked in a daycare center in Live Oaks, California, first, then in a school for teenaged mothers in Ogden, Utah; next I taught English as a second language at a Catholic college…

Featuring the poems: Shook Up Night and Day Swedish Sleds Lust Letters Recovery Mission

Featuring the poems: My father’s mansion More and tinier [Featured as Poem of the Week, May 8, 2008] Prayer on bus The Suicide Rural husband   More and tinier A…    read more

Harrison Miller’s wife stood in the shallow end of the pool surrounded by her admirers. From his chaise on the deck, Harrison could see the men’s chests and shoulders, their heads bent toward her, faces expectant.

Interviewer: I’ve heard you say that you’re not the funny person in your family. Amy’s funny. Your brother’s funny. When did you figure out that you were funny? Sedaris: Oh, I’m not really.…    read more

The wind lifted. The sky above Sandro’s head was filled with a flurry of little yellow leaves. Frantically airborne, they resisted for one last instant the inevitability of the fall. Sandro sat on a wooden bench, his elbows resting on the picnic table behind him, and gazed up at the sudden pandemonium.

Here she was again, in a strange apartment, at a party, alone. The first glass of wine gulped too quickly. Later, she would be certain it was the backless couch that had caused her to drink too much.

The woman who was not my mother was named Sheila Stanton, and at the age of nineteen she was held captive for ninety-one days by the Red Ribbon Strangler. That was during 1967, the Summer of Love. After she was freed by a swat team, Stanton found herself the nation’s celebrity du jour.

Featuring the poems:  The Captive The Prophetess A Pound of Flesh

Love and loneliness, paradox, uncertainty, nonfiction necessarily tinged with fiction–this issue’s authors offer the lumpiness, conflict, illogic, and ambiguity of life as lived.