CONTENTS | |
| Carl Phillips | Like History Canoe |
| Karen Rigby | Knife. Bass. Woman Desideratum |
| Bruce Weigl | Home |
| Josip Pupacic | My Three Brothers |
| Mary Crow | Travel Footloose |
| Sandra McPherson | Blossom River Drive Children of the Village |
| Christopher Davis | Under the Projection Booth Sustenance |
| John Gallaher | Gentlemen in Turbans & Ladies in Cauls |
| James Tate | Never Enough Darts In a Past Life |
| Wendy Battin | An Asterisk Named Fred Astaire The Ferry Lies Down on a Sharp Rock |
| Jeff Hoffman | All My Boxers Estonia |
| Carol Potter | Exile Translation Problems |
| Ali Yuce | Spindle |
| Jack Stewart | Firefight |
| Lance Larsen | Yellowstone, Burning Funeral Buffet |
| Robert Thomas | The Blue Willow Curse |
| Heather Sellers | The word (father) occurs to me Bucky Ditched Me |
| Celia Gilbert | Mimosa What She Found |
| Jonah Winter | Variations on a Theme by Copernicus Psalm |
| Christopher Howell | Backyard Astronomy |
| Angie Estes | Amor Ornamenti Narrative Rhapsody |
| Thorpe Moeckel | Shadow From Monument Peak |
| Mark Irwin | The Field |
| Jean Valentine | To the Bardo |
| Doug Anderson | In Case You Think This Is About Fidelity, Let Me Set Your Face on Fire Petitionary Prayer on Nguyen Duy's Roof |
| Poetry 2000: Three Review-Essays | |
| David Young | Reading Larry Levis (Larry Levis, The Selected Levis) |
| Pamela Alexander | The Landscape of the Mind (Peter Klappert, Chokecherries: New and Selected Poems 1966-1999) |
| Martha Collins | Nine Times Out of Ten (Ho Xuan Huong, Spring Essence, translated by John Balaban) |
I made mistakes in French.
I made mistakes on the French train.
I made mistakes in the hotel.
I was tired
in a French town.
I got lost.
I made bad change.
I could not understand the woman
I was traveling with. In English.
We were driving
a car through cicadas.
It's a translation problem.
That one place in the city of.
In the town of.
Something you thought
you could find,
but can't locate.
Perfect posture,
beautiful eyes, but
you had to wait for her
everywhere.
If you wanted her.
Village of. City of.
The town you could get lost in.
Train hurtles
through the station
and does not stop.
I made mistakes.
I was riding
in the wrong coach.
I was sitting backwards
in a foreign tongue.
--Carol Potter
Blasphemous I know to fill my plate while the dead
mumble about eternity. If only I dared
to peek in the casket, if only I could confess
to a priest who grasped the epistemology
of hunger. The table is as long
and lacquered as a bowling lane, full as a king's
pantry, and I'm always arriving famished.
If only I knew how I lost my shoes
and who fitted me with this embossed silverware.
Such obscene abundance--quiche,
tortellini, figs, borsch, game hens stuffed
with giblets and sage and all the vices
of the overfed. If only I knew these great aunts
buttoned up the back like religious dogma,
if only the croissants didn't glisten so.
Listen, dark cousin, avatar, or whoever
you are--I'm famished with waiting, full
of this world and its pottage. When will you break
bread with me, lead me across the water,
let me use your face as a mirror?
If only the dead could bury the dead, if flutes
and peasant dancers, if a proper manual,
if my unclean lips and a little rain. If eating
weren't always a substitute for something else.
--Lance Larsen