Vol. 6, No. 2 Contents

Restless, shifting, fugacious as time itself is a certain vast bulk of the population of the red brick district of the lower West Side. Homeless, they have a hundred homes.

One dollar and eighty-seven cents. That was all. And sixty cents of it was in pennies. Pennies saved one and two at a time by bulldozing the grocer and the vegetable man and the butcher until one's cheeks burned with the silent imputation of parsimony that such close dealing implied. Three times Della counted it. One dollar and eighty-seven cents.

In a little district west of Washington Square the streets have run crazy and broken themselves into small strips called "places." These "places" make strange angles and curves. One Street crosses itself a time or two.

She hadn't said anything about the cancer, even though Rayna had talked to her every day.

The day her husband died, her period stopped. It just shut itself off and left her, left the blood building and boiling inside, fermenting into this rage that she could only release at the piano. It wasn't supposed to happen like that…

There are 42 lines on each page of the Gutenberg Bible, sometimes called the 42-line Bible.

Among sayings that have a currency in spite of being wholly false upon the face of them for the sake of a half-truth upon another subject which is accidentally combined with error, one of the grossest and broadest conveys the monstrous proposition that it is easy to tell the truth and hard to tell a lie. I wish heartily it were.

I would not mind it if your heart were a television

And within it a time capsule

And inside that some secret I never knew

It's in the hand—a wandering—

my eyes, the pockets

of your pants.

Of doors and red-eyed windows,

the senses before sight.

I became specific

in my body.

The imaginary café where I met him

burned down, taking our last glances.

Is he our grandfather,

writing lesbian love poems?

You're boiling baby spinach before

that dreaded date, your hands

quake like the leaves on the stewing

water, backbones wilting in heat.

Mother's breasts flutter to the table,

"They won't hold up," she says.

The rest of her cards fly

on bowed wings.

Not always another chance is coming. Not

if you are lit on fire and keep the sad news

to yourself.

bliss

comes lightly and leaves

quickly, leaves nothing

much behind.

Were we down so better than

to take the dress off

and waste my chance again?

…a third-grader with cornrows in her hair

and skin the color of walnut, asks me:

"Is it true that men always want

to know what women are thinking?"

Bright Star! would I were steadfast as thou art—

Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night,

And watching, with eternal lids apart,

Like Nature's patient sleepless Eremite…

No, no, go not to Lethe, neither twist

  Wolfs-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine;

Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kiss'd

  By nightshade, ruby grape of Proserpine…

O Goddess! hear these tuneless numbers, wrung

  By sweet enforcement and remembrance dear,

And pardon that thy secrets should be sung

  Even into thine own soft-conched ear…

Four Seasons fill the measure of the year;

There are four seasons in the mind of man:—

He has his lusty Spring, when fancy clear

Takes in all beauty with an easy span…

When I have fears that I may cease to be

Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain,

Before high-pilèd books, in charact'ry

Hold like rich garners the full-ripen'd grain…

measures

the width

of her shoulders,

washes

with a clean sponge…

The flurries begin

whitening the strip

of grass.

I swear, friendship hangs on the hardest wind.

The moon is the friend of the earth

and the earth of the sun.

We want the gray old

winter to climb down

through the smoking pines

astride his white mule

to forgive us each separately.

This is her spot:

a child in an apple tree, eyes falling

into the way things want to be

seen:…

Here, tourists sift sand between toes, not knowing

salt makes straw of hair. I explore the ocean for one

of Christa McAuliffe's strands.

Your mother asked if I was certain, and I had to excuse myself

to call you from the bathroom.

Is that why you're here? I'm not

talking about my health anymore…

Suddenly she's bawling, tells the entire story, like you do

when your world is unfamiliar, the hazy bodies lost in black.

It takes six years for the pieces to make themselves apparent…

Bellefontaine: a town on the way to somewhere else, a place

where you run out of gas, stop to make love on a picnic table

somewhere by the wheat field—when, toward magic hour, the boy

already loaded the gun, the smell of bacon wafting outside…

the foreigners of the thought of Richard were in the top of each

emitted tree the government gathered…

richard thought aliens were at the top of every government-issued tree.

The Richard thought foreigner by each government…

Four boys stand

four years old, in the boat.

A fifth floats, face swayed to bottom,

near the prow.