Online Exclusives

12.12.99
Matter Has Been Blown off the Surface of this V   i   s   i   b   le Star
In my collection of gluons whose color adds up
to white:

a time the universe

was the size of a darkening
string [...]
12.07.99
Horses
by Michael Eastman
introduction by William H. Gass
Everything swims up into its eyes. Its agility, its strength, its swiftness: These qualities soften though they do not lessen as they rise. [...]
11.26.99
Canaan
The news is always of rapture

A plume of dust, the raking of ashes [...]
11.10.99
The Lightning Field (V)
Your mind unkinks itself like carded wool
as one foot steps in front of the other, circling
the five-foot figure-eight infinity loop [...]
10.17.99
HIGH PRESSURE/film shoots
by Kathrin Rögala
translated by W. Martin
and off the mark meadows tipped in in green, which should serve as a pattern here for figures, but the landscape doesn’t know anything, just talk to it, though, and it’ll give in at once. as always [...]
10.08.99
Sappho’s Sparrows
there are so many places to find you   in the endless   white spaces you have left us [...]
09.27.99
Remembering Mr. Gaddis
A memorial tribute was held May 6, 1999, for the late William Gaddis, the esteemed novelist who died in December 1998. [...]
05.19.99
The Raven
Story time done but plenty left over, riches of fishes and fancy comestibles heaped on the table within; a toast, friends, to the slow servant! No master for me. One of the oldest professions, mine, and right honorable, too. [...]
05.17.99
Some Maps
Which it watches, where it waits
In cleft or cavern or crevasse
In dolmen or diluvial boulder-hoard
Not the fissure, not the fosse, a flaw [...]
04.04.99
The Word Laid Bare
Congealed, concertinaed version of “I bet he’s had it,” meaning he has come to grief. [...]
02.27.99
What Happened with Gilbert That Night
Think of our silhouettes lengthening across the bare stage, the creak of the wooden boards beneath our feet, the broken spotlights of gray glass, the dizziness as he twirled me erasing the curtains from my sight, his muscled legs folded in bunched trousers, the actors gone home. [...]
02.12.99
Mechanics
                         Will you
                                      not come again?

                          I will go—
there soon.
                          Will you
                                      not come again?

                          I will cross—
the river twice [...]
01.24.99
A Quiet Poem
My father screamed whenever the phone rang.

My aunt often screamed when she opened the door. [...]
01.03.99
Fog Life
One, two, three, four … strung in a seaward-running necklace each foghorn sounded progressively more distant, a warning that here an island lay. [...]
01.01.99
Paper Head Last Lyrics
They are said to be in the book,
           but there is no book. [...]

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In Print

Vol. 80
Ways of Water
Spring 2023
Edited by Bradford Morrow

Online

May 31, 2023
Ice worms first start communing with me in Forlandsundet, a miles-deep sound north of the Greenland Sea. I don’t speak Norwegian, but I can parse: For. Land. Sun. It’s completely black outside. Det means “that or it.” Det, that’s easy, I’ve been one all my life.

The KV Svalbard is an icebreaker. From the foredeck, the rocky screes sweeping west are the planet’s emptiest place. No one between us and the North Pole.

Det,” I hear, “Oi Det.” I can’t locate the strange, oblong voice, more of a nose whistle. Near me? but not inside me. I soon give up.
May 24, 2023
Of course the book she writes—the lesser book, the book about nothing—becomes a popular text, one that readers adore. When they ask her what she will write next, she says she is going to write the book over. Over? they ask her.
       Again, she says. She isn’t really a writer, she tells them, she’s a transcriber. She transcribes stories.
       Across languages? they ask.
       No, she says. That would be translation. I used to do that but stopped, she says. Now I transcribe. I take texts and transcribe them into another version of the same language.
       So you rewrite, they say.
       No, she says. You’ll see.
May 18, 2023
For thousands of years, the peoples of the Marshall Islands have entertained a bustling interisland travel by canoe and small sailing craft without any of the tools—compass, sextant, nautical charts, and, these days, GPS—on which the rest of the world has depended. Within a purely oral tradition, Marshallese navigators developed a highly refined system of voyaging, relying entirely on their senses to decipher the subtlest of codes in the aqueous environment. Theirs has always been a world of waves.