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Cover art by Begoña Lathbury

Parings

Issue 27.2, Spring 1998 Margaret Hermes It was strange to return to this place of childhood, which I remembered darkly.  It had seemed to me back then that everyone was always hungry, always suspicious.  People wore too many clothes and still they could never get warm.  Everything was heavy — the coats, the shoes, the…
Cover art by Michael Merck

Mapping the Mythic and the Real: An Interview with Joyce Carol Oats

Issue 34.1, Spring 2005 K.E. Semmel I have a word of the day calendar of forgotten English. Each day, I can tear off a page to get an odd and generally useless word that has long since disappeared from everyday speech. The day I interviewed Joyce Carol Oates, August 12th, I was struck by the…
Cover art by Kathryn McDonnell

On Having a Crush on a Professor

Issue 32.1, Spring 2003Simone Muench We all know about the pedestal-effect:      a person on a platform          preens and the world adores, tossing bras and glossolalia.      Everybody knows that us girls          just wanna fuck our fathers.                      But it’s the glissade of his voice                  through the ear to the stomach’s             …
Cover art by Dan Hiller

Ghosts

Issue 37.1, Spring 2008 Jason Skipper This was an hour before my dad brought his cancer into our lives. One hour before he reached inside the glovebox of our Dodge conversion van for the pamphlets. The ones with cartoons and words like benign, malignant, and larynx, all explained. I had just gotten my learner’s permit…
Cover art by Warren Craghead

Metal

Issue 41.1, Spring 2012 George Such This will hurt, he told me, and it did, but I was determined not to show my pain.  And I didn’t.  But I sure felt the sharp prick of the needle as it repeatedly entered my ear in different places, each injection a hot star, part of a constellation…

Fireplace

Phoebe 21.1, Fall 1991 Joel Brouwer Find me the nitwit who post-central-heating cooked up the idea of employing fire for ornament and I’ll show you a dunce who dines with thieves. But also, I’ll bet, a zillionaire. Because who doesn’t love living rooms lit up chimney red, the hiss of sap evaporating? Forget third-degree burns…
Cover art by Dan Hiller

Runway

Phoebe 37.1, Spring 2008 Kim Chinquee There were flybys where I lived and I was curious about them. Their sounds pounded on the hollow of my ears. I got used to the sound and smell of airplanes, living on the airbase, and got to know the aircraft schedule, timing it like clockwork. When the airplanes…
Cover art by Dan Hiller

Plastic Cups

Phoebe 37.1, Spring 2008 Kim Chinquee I’d let my hunger ride, knowing that night there was a party. We went to Stacy’s sister’s house and handed her the money, giving her our orders. She must’ve been twenty-five or thirty, and she put her smoke out, dipping it into the ashtray. She knew what we wanted.…
Cover art by Dan Hiller

Log

Phoebe 37.1, Spring 2008 Kim Chinquee He followed a schedule, ran in a club. He studied his training and his diet, figuring equations, drinking PowerAid and Gel, comparing that to a banana. She logged the details of her running in a journal: how the air felt on her skin, green or gray, silent, if she’d…
Cover art by David Cantor

Charleston

From Phoebe 14.3/4, Spring 1985 Phoebe 14.3/4, spring 1985 Anne Wiegard Beth was my mother’s fifth child, and the doctors thought it wise to correct a condition resulting from multiple births, loosened muscles. I wasn’t sure which muscles were loose, but Mom lay in bed with her knees up and apart, the sheet making a white tent over…