Vol. 4, No. 3 Contents

Richard is an outcast. He has bony elbows and a face that's all nose.

On 25 March an unusually strange event occurred in St. Petersburg.

My boyfriend is a helium balloon, way above me, gently tugging at my hand. His head tosses in the breeze, craning whichever way the wind blows, his neck long and flimsy. I tell my friends how jealous this makes me—that he's looking at other girls—and they say I am being silly.

Kaya is missing. She is nowhere on the beach and Steve is worried that she's gone swimming, and has slipped drunk into the ocean and drowned.

When I woke up without my little toe, I knew it was going to be the day.

History's typecast of "the mother" breeds thoughts of the bored housewife, entertaining herself with embroidery, pastel aprons, and flip hairdos. Herstory relates a more honest and complex definition of the mother, much like the work of Beth Ann Fennelly's poems in Tender Hooks.

since regaining all my faith

in aerosols,

sweet whipped cream for instance.

She learned later she'd lunched with a movie

star from Mexico. They'd almost exchanged

Ah! He didn't offer his S.U.V.,

didn't apologize for the deranged…

I am! yet what I am none cares or knows…

I found a ball of grass among the hay

And progged it as I passed and went away;

And when I looked I fancied something stirred,

And turned again and hoped to catch the bird…

I had a laughter & for that

you had fir trees.

So the wire bird abandons writing.

I give up

my plastic mouse.

The apartment lobby choked with incense.

Tiger said why are you

so pretty. I have seen you in pearls

and laces. At night

kissing each part of your nothing.

Always I send what can only be called love.

Eating goat cheese & our friend's salad

we are frivolous as pronouns.

Snowflakes here fall like all the others.

They may as well be microscopic,

crushed bones. They cannot melt

even if the ground somehow forgives.

It is both the depth of field and snow

that have shortened the telephone poles

by half or more.

in a pale yellow Tupperware bowl on the way into Boston…

Father Latta held a quarter

in one of his two closed hands.

Which hand? He was quietly telling

jokes to pictures of dead pastors…

He could find no better word for life

than flat.

You spank me with library books about horses and nature and cruelty. I can jump out of clouds and over fences just as you can turn corners in Schlachendale.

Yearly returners to the empty desert lots

blossom in this wintering.

The message of this afternoon could be a hollow nest

if fairgrounds in a park can feel this empty.

In the middle of it, being riven

apart by a finger, by a stiff tongue probing

the blind bone tail of my spine…

Shit has a history & it's balmy golden

notes off a black clarinet. Damp &…

My eye never filled with blood.

I never asked why

was I drugged and held down. Taken away.

Mesmerized. I wasn't a two-headed dog…

I saw your mouth trailing off except one small leaf.

Try a sweeter martini,

flakes of a little dry laugh.

Wake up 5 A.M. & the prairie is raining

white birds. The moon appears. The moon

circles the sky. My mouth is a dead lamp

looking for its light. The river is a tape loop…

We are standing in a window, looking out at windows. The windows on the other side are blind. They are on the other side. To look out is to see; to look in, to turn slowly white.