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. 80
Ways of Water
Spring 2023
Edited by Bradford Morrow

Online

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.
With photographs by the author
May 10, 2023
I’ve been snorkeling in this river for sixteen years now and documenting a small stretch of it for about thirteen. Once a week, year ‘round, regardless of the weather, I will swim for several hours, picking up trash as I go, but mostly photographing what I find—fish and turtles, plants and rocks, even the contours of the riverbed, which change depending on the flow. Based on John Burroughs’ maxim—“To learn something new, take the path that you took yesterday”—I decided a long time ago to focus on the half-mile reach that runs from City Park, through Sewell Park, and on to the spillway below Spring Lake.