The Apiculturalist
Kimiko Hahn
In black veiled hat and canvas gauntlets Jean Paucton, seventy, climbs the baroque stairs of the Palais Garnier opera house to his rooftop apiary. The theatrical prop man studied beekeeping at the Jardin’s venerable institute then hauled onto the seventh…
Gravity
Erin Stalcup
“We are suspenders of disbelief, easily enchanted by possibility, addicted to wonder. So whatever measure of faith we harbor in the fallibility of gravity may, like our faith in so many things, be sustained not by facts or lack of…
Review of A Voice For The Silenced
Margot Demopoulos
Review of Armenian Golgotha: A Memoir of The Armenian Genocide, 1915-1918, Grigoris Balakian, Translated by Peter Balakian and Aris Sevag, Knopf, 2009, 509 pages, $35.00 During his year in Auschwitz, Primo Levi never stopped recording the world around him. Decades…
What This Is About
Dan Coshnear
This morning, like most mornings, my wife Susan let the rats loose to crawl along the counter top as she was preparing the kids’ lunches for school. Shnookums, the white one, found a gap in the tile beneath the mantel.…
General Syntax
Matthew Cooperman
A better world shall emerge on account of this. A general is just an anybody, events, places, things I could tell you about to make a nerve end squeal. Age wrinkles the body, withers the tome. I want so much…
Current
Beth Bosworth
I was drowning. We were at Sippewisset Beach on Cape Cod and my mother and her neighbor Bertha sat on beach chairs. They wore one-piece bathing suits and thigh-length terrycloth robes. Bertha took her robe off. The sun gleamed on…
Has King’s Dream Been Realized?
Samantha N. Simpson
Review of Best African-American Essays 2009, Eds. Gerald Early and Debra J. Dickerson, Bantam, 2009, 320 pages, $16.00 That question trailed Reverend Al Sharpton during the celebration of Barack Obama’s inauguration. In a talk delivered at the University of North…
Review of Best African American Fiction 2009
Samantha N. Simpson
Eds. Gerald Early and E. Lynn Harris, Bantam, 2009, 336 pages, $16.00 Perhaps reading and writing fiction means something different to African American audiences and writers. In the opening of his introduction to the inaugural edition of Best African American…
Laocoon
Paisley Rekdal
And then he says, Laocoon suffers, yes; but he suffers like Sophocles’ Philoctetus: we would like to bear pain ourselves the way this sublime man bears it, but I do not see him bearing it. There is the snake…
The Cane Break
Nathan Poole
Q.U is what we all called him, but the name really stands for Quintis. Someone gave him a navy blue hat years ago and he wore it everyday since. It had a big long flat brim and a blue mesh…
Continuing
Shane McCrae
Dear Lord if this is what I make of my / Body why give me Lord a body if It might have been like all creation beautiful Why give it Lord to me that even now / Survives the fattening and the disease…
Thom Gunn: A Memoir of Reading
Randall Mann
At seventeen, in Orlando, Florida, I found, in my Language Arts textbook, my first Thom Gunn poem, “On the Move.” (And lucky me, because I had something of a Keats hangover, which is to say that I was writing unromantic…
“Killer”
Scott Kenemore
When Lanie called and said I should rush over, I knew it’d be something strange. Lanie is the bassist in my brother’s rock band, but also works as a mortician. “Bring your inks,” she said. And I said: “What, all…
Lost Water
Thomas Gough
For Grace Paley Each day the water pours out of the mountains. I rise and stand at the door of the shed to hear this water I cannot see, and I think this water is falling down the world, falling…
Anniversary Cards
Merle Drown
Before moving my mother to the nursing home, I sorted the personal stuff with her. I did it without my brothers because I knew they wouldn’t want anything. When we were nearly finished, Ma pointed to the wooden jewelry box…
Review of Russell Edson’s See Jack
Joseph Campana
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009, 80 pages, $14.95. If you pick up Russell Edson’s latest collection of poems, See Jack, it just might break your heart: With a carnivorous hat or with an incontinent faucet or with a plate (or…
Criminals
Corey Zeller
What about the goons? Those criminals thwarted and left for dead in every action movie for the past thirty years. I’m sure at least a dozen survived the slaughters. This one who quit working for Columbian drug smugglers is now…
The Pursuit of What Exists
Zach Savich
Review of Sam Sampson’s Everything Talks, Auckland University Press and Shearsman Books, 2008, 80 pages, $15.00 “And everything that I did Did with me talk.” from “Wonder,” by Thomas Traherne A reviewer who loves the book under review should listen…
Pattern
Mary Rechner
The pencil-drawn woman on the front of the pattern packet had no face but she looked good anyway, legs apart, hip thrust forward. Her heels were extremely high. Make it Tonight, Wear it Tomorrow! exclaimed the envelope. Why Silvia wanted…
Fem Care
Elliott Holt
Halfway through the first day of our annual Beauty Summit in Miami, the facilitator says it’s time to take a break from our ideation session and have a team experience. We all close our laptops and look up at the…
a full-grown man in his ear
Jeff Encke
across the floor giant thistles waving in the ocean betraying him with a vulture a lost sight the first to see a woman barefoot in bed, staring at hope —clinging to the businessman of his dreams he felt on his back…
Do You Think We Should Pull Over?
Brian Doyle
Which famously was the question my friend Pete asked me as we were driving in New Hampshire and his car, this was the Datsun, BURST INTO FLAMES! FLAMES WERE SHOOTING FROM THE ENGINE RIGHT IN FRONT OF OUR EYES! and…
