Vol. 5, No. 2 Contents

During the long holiday of 1978, a man named Petrovesky came to live in our neighbourhood. Petrovesky was a giant who always wore a long black coat and carried a short black cane with a gold tip. He had a long nose, big blue eyes and a red beard that reached all the way down to his knees. He also had giant wings…

Dear Mom and Dad. We fly to Lima, Peru on Tues. Everyone says the airport there is the worst in the world and guarantees we'll get robbed. So, we're keeping our passports in our undies…

Since you've got a girl thats a friend, I haven't heard much of anything from you and had assumed you dead until Toni mentioned something about vancouver…

You say you are learning how to ask for things. I am learning how to do the things I ask for—

Begin to confuse, to confess, your stories with the stories of someone else, stories you were told there, that you were there to hear.

It's how Hemingway dies

in the children's biography

I found in the public library, white death

like a cloud descending…

…you know immediately

she won't live long: body a fourth

of our bodies, cut off below the chest,

legs hanging like cloth. African, late teens…

If it is not machine mastery, it is a language. Even without air, the cold clattering of padded keys impresses the tiny white seals with seams.

I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.

What hours, O what black hours we have spent

This night! what sights you, heart, saw; ways you went!

The telling time our task is; time's some part,

Not all, but we were framed to fail and die—

One spell and well that one. There, ah thereby

Is comfort's carol of all or woe's worst smart.

And all those hands, all that skin,

kisses brushing cheeks.

            I never once touched down, I kept out.

My plastic blinds, cast light                 To stir,

Like sleeping tabby cats, stomachs exposed, ringlets of striped fur…

at work i wonder

if i should take anti-depressant medicine

finally, i decide, no, i shouldn't…

i am able to sit through an extremely funny movie

without making a noise or changing my facial expression

i am incapable of laughing without trying to laugh

I watch the hound drape

a dead me with a red robe

instruct my child in morals,

correct my ethical shortcomings.

Sometimes my friends & I, we get to feeling persecuted.

You see, we have a strong sense of entitlement

& deep stores of confidence that we are, individually

& collectively, the most awesomest thing of all time.

You needn't be trying to comfort me,

I tell you my Dolly is dead!

There's no use in saying she isn't

With a crack like that in her head.

Truly, I never have seen the market and street so deserted!

How as if it were swept looks the town, or had perished!

Ow when of comely mien the son came into the chamber,

Turned with a searching look the eyes of the preacher upon him,

And, with the gaze of the student, who easily fathoms expression,

Scrutinized well his face and form and his general bearing.

Thus did the modest son slip away from the angry upbraiding;

But in the tone he had taken at first, the father continued…

Thus entertaining themselves, the men sat talking. The mother

Went meanwhile to look for her son in front of the dwelling,

First on the settle of stone, whereon 'twas his wont to he seated.

When she perceived him not there, she went farther to look in the stable…

Here the three men, however, still sat conversing together,

With mine host of the Lion, the village doctor, and pastor;

And their talk was still on the same unvarying subject,

Turning it this way and that, and viewing from every direction.

Now when the foreign judge had been by the minister questioned

As to his people's distress, and how long their exile had lasted,

Thus made answer the man: "Of no recent date are our sorrows;

Since of the gathering bitter of years our people have drunken…

Like as the traveller, who, when the sun is approaching its setting,

Fixes his eyes on it once again ere quickly it vanish…

Towards the setting sun the two thus went on their journey…

Muses, O ye who the course of true love so willingly favor…