Online Exclusives

12.17.05
Between Tongues: An Interview
I vividly recall my first bus ride on arriving in this country, from New York to Michigan. The feeling of SPACE, of relatively wild space, of woods going on and on was overwhelming to me.  [...]
12.17.05
Five Poems
Impossible. Without the idea of counting. To imagine numbers. Repeating an identical act, a particular mark. Over and over.  [...]
10.21.05
Two Poems
The programmer with his grim black bag brings no cure for encaged, gates shut, companions grimy. Spoonful of laughter, spoonful of lust, skill so droll that dolls call slaves to come and open the wall where I go so young again. Was it better when we used playthings? [...]
09.24.05
Arc XX: Paterfamilia
Of surrender or denial, surrender and denial
what voice will you offer to the dead
what alphabet to the suffering.  [...]
09.09.05
Three Poems
Finally, how to carry the sky
at twilight? A rose so cool [...]
08.26.05
Responsibilities of the Champagne Flutes
A day of awnings and fruitless steps. Pause. Something glinting and apparent and political in what she slices. [...]
08.11.05
Three Poems
It starts with examining our shores. An elastic shove 
could inch the edges out, said those who loved greatest 
and with massive breakers. [...]
07.27.05
The Book of Beginnings & Endings
And if it were possible to pursue the bleeding heart dove to her nest, what then? [...]
07.03.05
The Castle’s Origin
by Can Xue
translated by Rong Cai
Because there is no reason to live, he invents one to fill the void; with purity and vacuity the invented rationale fights the filth and congestion of reality. [...]
06.12.05
Storm, lustral
Blue as already the shoreline
is breaking, are you a
lakefront the question is
lacking  [...]
05.31.05
Nine Poems
You walk above in the light,
     Soulful genius, on a yielding floor! 
         God’s shining breezes
            Gently touch you  [...]
05.21.05
The Exotic Moods of Les Baxter
Memory of silt and blush.
A no-touch Ikebana arranges the river’s first thought.
This is how the Jade Fable ends.  [...]
05.07.05
Robert Creeley: In Memoriam
May 21, 1926–March 30, 2005
Lots of laughter
Before and after. Every meeting
Rhymed and fluttered into meter.
The beat was the message. [...]
04.27.05
Three Poems
I leave with that voice? In Austria the alps are blowing 
with bedsheets. The innkeeper sings my child, my child [...]
04.15.05
From Quandaries
imprisoned on the fissure the figure considers 
the fossils in the rock between the figure and the arrested  [...]
03.10.05
Four Poems
an eternity of New Wave 
Fridays, of the one perfect 

airplane haunting the tinsel 
town machinery undone  [...]
02.23.05
how human nouns
gone unnoticed the inevitable protagonists accrue 

fragile centipede working rot into unreliable endnotes  [...]
02.11.05
Scavenger’s Daughter
I would walk a tightrope for you

enter on entropy the balled up  [...]
01.13.05
Stations
 First, Audrey is in the garden. She will be there in the end. [...]
01.05.05
IS EE YO UA RE
Ibak is my name.

It doesn’t mean anything. [...]

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In Print

Vol. 82
Works & Days
Spring 2024
Bradford Morrow

Online

November 6, 2024
His body had been in the trunk some hours already when she began to feel him next to her in the cab as well. She couldn’t see him at first, could only sense he was there. But soon the hair on her right arm stood up and the air beside her began to shimmer. Before she began to see him fully, she whipped her gaze away.
October 30, 2024
This house isn’t haunted, has never been, but that will change when, some years from now, I will sometimes feel a chill, and sometimes I will feel alone, and sometimes a voice will say, “Who are you and what have you done with Donna?” And I will try to respond, but I won’t know who Donna is, won’t even know a Donna. I fear I might someday learn.
October 23, 2024
People like to believe they have influence over disasters, catastrophes, losses—by which they mean control—but that’s illusion, and she was done with illusion. Could she write that in her report? You’re all suffering under an illusion. Instead, she picked up the phone and texted: Island//illusion. Illusion//island. They sound the same when you say them enough. There’s a word for that, but I can’t remember it now. I can’t remember anything clearly. All my words are inverted and mirrored. edrorrim. See?