ISSUES | winter 2021

Take Heart  Plato banished poets and playwrights from his ideal Republic because he felt they dealt in irrationality and half-truths. Only philosophers, who deal in absolute truths, could occupy his…    read more

Gone  Linda Wastila    The late May morning I drove east from Chapel Hill, I didn’t pay much mind to the tracts of yellowed corn and soy or the tobacco-curing…    read more

Facing it  Sally Crossley    “there will be time    To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;”   —T. S. Eliot   The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock  …    read more

You Will Be Ready / Total Hysterectomy    There will be days in this medical experience  when you feel like you’re the only citizen   of Pluto, landed right in the…    read more

The Cadence of Waves  Trent Hudley  Leon showed up the day of the blackout in December of 1998, toward the end of some extreme El Niño weather we’d been having…    read more

Palace Rock  by Mason Kiser  On Mondays, we ruled the sea. Lightning lashed the whitecaps, and thunder shook the hull, and rain fell so slantwise that it ripped to shreds…    read more

Comfort Animals  Elise Juska  Lionel still remembered a time when, walking around campus, his very presence commanded a certain respect. Even if students hadn’t taken his classes, they took notice…    read more

Large Hairless Mammals  Rebecca Saltzman  Daphne and Thiago move to Florida in the radiant swell of August, when she is still bleeding. The birth, four weeks ago, did not go…    read more

Tree of Life  Translated from the Slovenian by Brian Henry    I was born in a field of grain and snapped my fingers.  White chalk crossed the green blackboard.  Dew…    read more

Counterweight    In the fall, the garden   folds in on itself—grand  stalk of kale on the ground   like a wilted chandelier,  still green tomatoes   that missed their chance   at red…    read more

Oranges  Robin Reif  We called it the Buffet of Dead Food: flaccid bacon, eggs—hard-boiled and cold—and toast so tough it scratched the roofs of our mouths. Still, the meal had…    read more

Clara Tice and the Art of Being Bohemian  In 1915, Clara Tice became the talk of the town when a series of her nude drawings exhibited at Polly’s Greenwich Village…    read more

Transformations: Creating Character in Contemporary Photography  Kristine Somerville  Vain trifles as they seem, clothes have, they say, more important offices than merely to keep us warm. They change our view…    read more

Death & Co.: The Contemporary Elegy and the Poetry of Mourning in a Season of Grief  Andrew Mulvania    Obit by Victoria Chang. Copper Canyon press, 2020, 120 pp., $17…    read more