This issue came together in a quietly spectacular way. As we put together the proofs, frost was icing the lawns of Salem, Oregon. Men were climbing ladders and hanging Christmas lights from the rooftops. As we edited the issue, we listened to the recordings of the Western Australian poems and communicated with the poets through email. Their voices and work radiated warmth in the chilly Pacific Northwest day. [more]
Bones and Sidney loved each other like soldiers and pitied all friendships not their own. In their last winter of high school, they rattled down Main Street in Bones’ ’82 Civic. The yet-to-overturned zoning laws of Hunnsicker Township prohibited change, one side of Main Street a city green and gazebo, the other a train of antique stores, candle stores, and an old-fashioned soda fountain called Saywell’s. Behind Main Street sprawled vast nothing, back roads and barren, loping fields of snow and mud ... [more]
The worries of your common life have released you for the night.
The cat vomit you left next to the couch; your sometimes-boyfriend, who left a message on your machine while you blotted your lipstick with a credit card bill; your goal to become editor of the trite features section of the newspaper and still be a contributor to world peace, etc.; gone, all of it ... [more]
1. What is your favorite color?
2. What is your idea of the perfect evening?
3. How long ago was your last relationship?
4. Did he know what your favorite color was? Did he ever try to create the perfect evening for you?
5. Was it a serious relationship? Did it last longer than the relationship before it?
6. When did you start seeing your relationships as a sequence? When did the sequence become something to be studied and understood, like a strand of DNA? [more]
Instead of titling the chapters after men I thought I loved:
Sam, Warren, Billy with the Wooden Leg, Dorian, Chuck,
Keith, Craig Who Was a Shondelle, Kevin, Peter the Shy,
Abed the Supposed Heart Doctor, I use the names
of casseroles that didn’t quite work out, in alphabetical order ... [more]
Across the Aries River, a town
burns like a slim, solo
ballerina’s turn. Do we still
have to go? For mortality,
the answer is yes ... [more]
Western Australian Showcase
The Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers’ Centre is the oldest writers’ center of its kind in Australia located in the Perth hills. Editor H.K. Hummel spent the month of August there as Writer-in-Residence. The following poems were collected and recorded in the bustling facilities located in the former home of Katharine Susannah Prichard, author of Coonardoo, Working Bullocks, and The Goldfields Trilogy.
movement on the waters
semen of a god catches flying foam
beauty born, pale curves of
hips, luxurious breasts
vicarious pleasures founded on
her Botticelli smile ... [more]