by Kelly Cherry | Mar 17, 2014
The boardwalk on the beachfront was tacky, although that did not put me off from buying dirt-cheap earrings with my leftover rubles, but away from the tourists—including plenty of Russians— outside the city, in the hills, forests, spectacular and...
by Richard Foerster | Mar 9, 2014
The crush of it: not just the body swaddled in the sweat of fear’s embrace, but the thought confined and bursting within its battered valise, buckled and strapped for a trip to nowhere but a smaller place inside a cell where every pulsing neuron pounds against the...
by Glenn Stowell | Mar 1, 2014
the language of grief is not exclusively human. A wolf carries off our goose by his gaunt neck in the night. His partner wanders the perimeter of our fields for six days until her honking grows hoarse. But it is the human: so much of what we are is what arrests us....
by Sean Prentiss | Feb 21, 2014
Like a benediction, we grow into a smaller language. So many words given up, disremembered, abandoned from tents & saw packs. What use here in the Middle Santiam Wilderness do we have for the word sink? When would we ever utter closet or phone or bank...
by Naomi Mulvihill | Feb 13, 2014
When I worked in an orphanage a boy came to harvest sugar cane in what he’d worn to work the street at a beach resort. His bunkmates picked up volcanic rock I later learned geologists call scoria—a word whose root gives us slag, drek and excrement. At...
by Matthew Lippman | Feb 5, 2014
If your wife hates you don’t go out and get another one, it’s probably not your fault anyway unless you put too many oranges in the bowl and were only supposed to place two. Still, she probably can’t count but that says nothing about the turn of her elbow on the...
