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Interview: Lee Smith by Cathy Cruise

Issue 21.2 Spring 1992 Born in Grundy, a small coal town in southwest Virginia, Lee Smith has written seven novels and two collections of short stories. Emerging from her fiction is a strong sense of Appalachian life and voices that inhabit that region. Smith defies literary cliches. She is unpretentious, direct, and rather than carefully…

Trail

Lyn Lifshin   to take it in   to let earth grass any fruit    your body’s leaves pass thru me And the poem a trail, natural shape left from making places for air for black earth to be light in   Lyn Lifshin has published over 130 books and chapbooks including 3 from Black Sparrow Press:…

The Taking Care Of Making It In A Small Town Business Man

Lyn Lifshin   a man on the make a man who wants to make money make yr friends   that   pretty business boy guess whats in his backroom guess who gets left in the   red he wants his wife but he doesnt want the store in her name    tags his   women by thier…

The Fur Dream, The Fur In His Hands

Lyn Lifshin   the way a cat that hasn’t been touched too long leaves parts of himself in yr hands   you thought of me wanted to write about me found fur in your dreams in yr stew   tho you never touched more than lightly still you said it made a mess changed yr…

Modes of Being

Denise Levertov       For Richard Edelman And for Nguyen Cong Hoan January’s fist unclenches.             Walls of brick are bastions of coral, welltempered, basking, and shadows yawn and stretch to the east.             Watching the afternoon, from the window watching it slowly brim and…

Dog-Star

Robert Bausch   “I shall live, if she continues in life, If she dies, I shall go with her…” —Ezra Pound   Soon, Gunther would come. And when he got there, she would leave him alone for awhile. Gunther came every day, and on some days he stayed most of the afternoon, and into the…
Cover art by Warren Craghead

All Aboard

  D.A. Powell   Almost anything that can happen can happen on water. Think how long Odysseus sailed in order to get home. Or at least remember the number of times you’re told it. How, naturally, you resist the end. The wind leads you astray. The islands, with their spicy markets and their straying limbs.…
Cover art by Warren Craghead

Six Secrets

D.A. Powell   Line up like we’re scrunching into a photograph. Do I look like a bunny to you? Well, don’t call me Bunny. Say I’m your schlubby chum. That schpoodel on your schmecky. We can bop around the neighborhood. With a Rottweiler named Hattie McDaniel Day Lewis. Into the camera obscura, you and Hattie…

It Was Like Those Collapsible Plastic Travelling Cups

Lyn Lifshin   with a cock like a collapsible cup that never worked right and leaves your lap a mess in the dark:  he wanted a girl with a hole that opened for him   sucked him in he didn’t know it had to have something to do with his penis Even his dreams were bloodless…