The Southern Review back issues from June 2007:
Contributors.
Jun 22, 2007 ... <Text rich="yes"> Gavin Adair has poetry in recent or forthcoming issues of <Italic>Louisiana Literature, Notre Dame Review, Mid-American Review, and Mississippi Review</Italic> . He lives in Brooklyn and moves things for a living.<Bold>RALPH ANGEL'S</Bold> most recent ...
Dance Performance.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2007; ... <Text rich="yes"> <Preformatted type="other"> My six- and nine-year-old sons are performing their homespun homeboy rap star angst, one-handed cartwheels, hips accentuating the fugue of hip hop melody, fingers and eyes snapping, indeed, something's astir, appetite or rage against the great ...
Husband.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2007; ... <Text rich="yes"> <Preformatted type="other"> What could be more picturesque than us eating lobster on the water, the sun vanishing over the horizon, willing, once again, to allow us almost any satisfaction. William James said marriage was overlooking; overlooking, yes, but also overlapping: ...
Louse Point.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2007; ... <Text rich="yes"> <Preformatted type="other"> I've wanted to write my way into paradise, leaving the door open for others .... Instead I am scribbling, beneath its wall, with the door shut. --DAVID IGNATOW This is where we came to swim around grassy islands, past dories and osprey nests ...
Envoy: To an Icon Painter from a Place of Heat.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2007; ... <Text rich="yes"> <Preformatted type="other"> A long way from his traditions the heat has been slow arriving: heat here is beyond the deeply red blood of martyrs, heat here brings a blue to the sky that is too pure, scalding all flight, making white barely visible. Easterlies are the fire ...
Icon Sketch: Abraham.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2007; ... <Text rich="yes"> <Preformatted type="other"> Out here, late winter the placid and yet partially terrifying weed, Paterson's curse, blooms its purple rush: below saturate skies it crosses from light to dark, a bright flow of night. The willingness to prove ...
The Descent into Hell (Anastasis).(Poem)
Jun 22, 2007; ... <Text rich="yes"> <Preformatted type="other"> In the mirrored gulleys light refracted neither red nor black rock, but a blend of gravel slurry and salt crystals that wouldn't go into solution. Between times, he drew the godly toward him--the machine's timing-chain tuned precisely, the run of ...
Dandelions: The Survivor.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2007; ... <Text rich="yes"> <Preformatted type="other"> Ellen Stine spent WWII underground in Berlin. Her first liberator was a Russian who had fought all the way from Moscow dragging a WWI machine gun on a rope. He made her to understand he wanted coffee. Afraid, she motioned him into her rubble ...
Dr. Heim.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2007; ... <Text rich="yes"> <Preformatted type="other"> In less than a year after/being assigned to Mauthausen/ our Dr. Heim operated/on 540 prisoners,/amputated/ healthy limbs,/cut & left abdomens/unsutured/ to observe infection/& agonized death./ One day he selected/two young men for their/ complete ...
Two Young Men.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2007; ... <Text rich="yes"> <Preformatted type="other"> We do not know who is doing the boiling & cleansing. Sounds have been whistling from my nasal cavities that Dr. Heim would surely liken to singing if he heard them, but ...
History.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2007; ... <Text rich="yes"> <Preformatted type="other"> I'm reading history on a bench outside a pool An aluminum fence concentrates glare, slants away. A child calls, "Erika, Erika"-- that's Erika on the diving board--then a shriek in air, ... but her body is whole, displaces water, surfaces. ...
To Janusz Korczak: The Orphans.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2007; ... <Text rich="yes"> <Preformatted type="other"> I know about this only what I've read: that your orphans were to be deported from the Warsaw Ghetto, that you chose to keep them company, then died with them in the gas at Treblinka. Teacher, can you teach us to accompany ...
Block Island.(Short story)
Jun 22, 2007; ... <Text rich="yes"> It was <Italic>Good Riddance</Italic> that put Adrian Littlefield on the lecture circuit. Before <Italic>Riddance</Italic> he'd self-published a couple pastel-covered self-help books with fashionably gerundial titles--<Italic>Learning to Love in the Present ...
At the D.Q.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2007; ... <Text rich="yes"> <Preformatted type="other"> Isn't the dream of the sod just the dream to get out of the sod? Didn't the geranium snapping its tonsils against the Dairy Queen window push upward in its pot for this-- to live, to look out on a rust-covered crane with its jaw full of rocks, an ...
Soap.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2007; ... <Text rich="yes"> <Preformatted type="other"> Usually they make it happen to a woman in her late thirties, beautiful, but a bit too deliberately so, just beginning to show in the set of her mouth that she understands there's no going back-- the time when, in reality, the beautiful begin to ...
What I Meant To Say About Childhood.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2007; ... <Text rich="yes"> <Preformatted type="other"> was the light infusing us and borders more like fur than surface, slurred with sun and somehow spilling into others, bowls into bowls, our heads dipped and bobbing as we sat in the half-moon circle on the wooden floor. This was in Indian-style, ...
Fall Too Soon.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2007; ... <Text rich="yes"> <Preformatted type="other"> It's a thing of mind now like a shiver or a reflex soon-frozen ground cold and slick yet the quake...
The Summer I Read All Seven Volumes of "A la recherche du temps perdu".(Poem)
Jun 22, 2007; ... <Text rich="yes"> <Preformatted type="other"> The little house became a little globe of domesticity; the yard up front abuzz and wild, a bush the firmament of the lilies' bright orange stars. Although it wasn't a farmhouse, we called it that. There we had our bed, our coffee every morning on ...
What We Got Out of It.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2007; ... <Text rich="yes"> <Preformatted type="other"> The day before we left Iowa City, a wounded cat--thin with the scrawn of sickness, an open gash taking up half his neck (and, the vet said, the vilest case of ear mites she'd ever seen)--appeared on the front porch and asked to be saved, rubbing ...
Ode to Seven.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2007; ... <Text rich="yes"> <Preformatted type="other"> Everybody knows that there is a finite span of immediate memory and that ... this span is about seven items in length. --GEORGE A. MILLER, <Italic>The Psychological Review</Italic> (1956) List all the coincidences that you can remember: days ...
What Water Can We Pour on This Page?(Poem)
Jun 22, 2007; ... <Text rich="yes"> <Preformatted type="other"> I've been partitioning my minutes with a modest butter knife, balancing checkbooks and poems, calculating panic on a dry, white page. I've been measuring emotion like a bony chef holding, with one hand, the bottle of oil, and with the other, a ...
Coltrane's Sound.(Critical essay)
Jun 22, 2007; ... <Text rich="yes"> My father was late for dinner again, and I was grateful. There would be no tirade at the table, no rant about not being able to park his own car in his own garage because of my brother's drag racing projects. No frenzied straightening of my mother's desk, where she wrote ...
FEMA Trailers, Moonlit Night.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2007; ... <Text rich="yes"> <Preformatted type="other"> Without the never-ending game of hoops that parts for passing cars, I barely recognize my mama's street--tiled white, packed tight with FEMA trailers up on cinder blocks. Strolling to the corner store? No more. Not with sidewalks cooling in the ...
Lost in Betsy.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2007; ... <Text rich="yes"> <Preformatted type="other"> Hurricane Betsy used to take the blame for what my people lost or never had-- deed to the house, photographs, kamikaze contraband smuggled into Gentilly by way of an Iwo Jima ex-marine, the Great Wall of China, in needlepoint, framed: I thought ...
The Most of It.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2007; ... <Text rich="yes"> My Aunt Miel, who never married and whom I never met, was eccentric, and the most of it was her handwriting. She was my mother's sister and lived at a distance, having gotten a job with the Singer Sewing Machine Company that required her to sit in a storefront and sew so ...
Bar Pilots.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2007; ... <Text rich="yes"> <Preformatted type="other"> All summer their prows push the weight of waves, descending broad blades into the sea's hills, these men riding prow backs in the sun, wind misting kelp mire as their boats buoy the rough route into the shark gray mouth of the open sea. A ...
Be the Dog.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2007; ... <Text rich="yes"> <Preformatted type="other"><Bold>I</Bold> The administrative assistant stands serenelywith her green cloth coat on, Friday, 5:02. Her boss taps his Montblanc, mentioningthe misdirected invoice for the eighth time. She knows he has recently been responsible...
The Greatest of Ease.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2007; ... <Text rich="yes"> <Preformatted type="other"> That? It's the bar from an old trapeze. I don't know what happened to the rope. Funny how they say "trapeze artist." Not performer or acrobat or gymnast. Like "escape artist." Is it really an art? When I think of escaping, it's sheer impulse, ...
Azarel (Angel of Death).(Poem)
Jun 22, 2007; ... <Text rich="yes"> <Preformatted type="other"> literally, from the Hebrew, <Italic>helps God</Italic> Death the lawyer adjudicates between us. We can't stray too far, can't kill each other, For Death, the honorable, presides, Superior Court judge, Death comes down and we settle: All the ...
Haruspicy.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2007; ... <Text rich="yes"> <Preformatted type="other"> In good old Greece, to read futures in entrails, The scatter of bird bones and guts on a beach-- All day they shuttled you from floor to floor Through narrows--CAT scan, X ray, MRI-- And then some canisters of chalky, endless Barium you had to ...
Mick on the Make: Notes on an Unusual Name.(Essay)
Jun 22, 2007; ... <Text rich="yes"> <Preformatted type="other">We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what wepretend to be.--KURT VONNEGUT </Preformatted> There's this comic strip, <Italic>Bringing Up Father</Italic> , created in 1913, but if you ask your grandparents, ...
Of Earth and Water.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2007; ... <Text rich="yes"> <Preformatted type="other"> Beneath our waters,The braided mooring cable sprouts tufts of rust, Hairs dark as a newborn's, its drama pent up, Now, released, a time lapse flowering, Intricate, inevitable, tragic. Here, son, are the taut, ...
An Exile's Letter.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2007; ... <Text rich="yes"> [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] <Preformatted type="other"> Greetings ... and a kiss. And now ... what do I say now? Where should I begin ... where end? The cycle of time is endless. And what do I possess in my exile but a tiny knapsack of breadcrumbs and ...
Call to Prayer.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2007; ... <Text rich="yes"> <Preformatted type="other"><Bold>I</Bold> You walk in that door, you'll be in line a half hour, I told her. We need to unload this truck. Meanwhile, Sean sat heavy on a pile of cardboard in front of a halal place, <Italic>The End of Atheism</Italic> and ...
Counseling the Youth.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2007; ... <Text rich="yes"> <Preformatted type="other"> He told him each hit is like a blow: sends a shock wave through the brain to bounce off the skull's back wall. It's like boxing, he told him--if you're hit again before the first shock fades, the waves collide, bounce around; you have to ...
The Older Woman.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2007; ... <Text rich="yes"> <Preformatted type="other"> means a younger man. Without him, she's just sipping cappuccinos alone at some canal-side restaurant in Venice or lobbing a long one to her unfaithful yet age-appropriate, career-compatible significant other or curled up as the cupie-doll ...
Hypothetical Question.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2007; ... <Text rich="yes"> <Preformatted type="other"> Say we'd never met and you married Michele, your former fiance, back when you were nineteen and pretty much insane, but now you've grown up and married, Michele, I mean, her children not half-Samoan, but half ...
Rock Star.(Short story)
Jun 22, 2007; ... <Text rich="yes"> Sometime during the night, my breathing simply stops. I wake, chest throbbing, and suck hard at the air. But it is as if fingers have pinched closed my trachea, as if I am drawing breath through a sponge. I heave my body forward, reach for the walls, the light switch, ...
Blue Tuesday.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2007; ... <Text rich="yes"> <Preformatted type="other"> I want to invent a thing as beautiful and useless as the Slinky. Because it's Blue Tuesday, second Tuesday of February, a tradition invented by my mother who's fond of puzzlers-- say, Did the first inventor invent the notion of "new and ...
Capitalism.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2007; ... <Text rich="yes"> <Preformatted type="other"> Inventing something's only half the matter. Then, the naming. For professionals of American automobile marketing, this means a living coming up with Mustang, Astrovan, Escalade--meal tickets of chrome and rubber ego enhancement. Imagine the ...
Breech.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2007; ... <Text rich="yes"> Syzmanski, the farmer's kid, finally enlisted; he was beaded for Pendleton at the end of August. For now be was bloody, up to his elbows in the birth canal of a Guernsey, while his father braced himself as best he could at the end of the thick hemp rope, straining to ...
I Make My X.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2007; ... <Text rich="yes"> <Preformatted type="other"> Driving this morning, and a poem came to me, so simple, so pure, Keats himself couldn't conceive it, and then, turning onto Lombard Street, I lost it. My first novel, five years in the writing, leapt like an antelope, but it was stolen from our ...
Leaving.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2007; ... <Text rich="yes"> <Preformatted type="other"> They outdo each other, drawing secret metals from the earth to turn magenta, crimson, orchid, sunbather cinnamon. They wrap the brown grass like a present. Where have they learned this extravagance of leftover sun in ...
Questionnaire.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2007; ... <Text rich="yes"> <Preformatted type="other"> My daughter calls to ask me questions for a survey in her college class: <Italic>Can you name something meaningful you've lost?</Italic> Interpreting my silence as a blank she tries to help: <Italic>It can be anything,</Italic> she tells ...
What I Should Know by Now.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2007; ... <Text rich="yes"> <Preformatted type="other"> What I should know by now is a mystery. Most of what I've learned has puddled back into darkness. In the larger scheme I'm flypaper in the Arctic, the extended warranty, picture-in-picture, whatever useless thing we tack on afterward. I breathe ...
Each Minute.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2007; ... <Text rich="yes"> <Preformatted type="other"> The night my friend phoned from the cancer center in Houston to tell me he'd been diagnosed with leukemia, the news colored my thoughts and subthoughts. Among them were these nine: * He must have done something wrong; the world is very stern. * ...
Last Touch.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2007; ... <Text rich="yes"> <Preformatted type="other"> He lay there propped up on his bed death-masked When I leaned down and kissed his forehead it was not exactly that I felt a warm wish to kiss him it was more that I needed a gesture an outward sign of farewell Maybe I knew that later I would ...
Way Way Up There.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2007; ... <Text rich="yes"> <Preformatted type="other"> At the top of the Milky Way there is a room where sits the Narrator Supreme filling thickest of notebooks with the total story of everything that has ever mattered-- in that dark scrawl Rome is set down, and Carthage, I, you, all, preserving ...
Zeppelin of Time.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2007; ... <Text rich="yes"> <Preformatted type="other"> We were happy, some, in Kalamazoo-- I see it here in my diary. On a day in March, for instance, we walked over to Flipside Records and bought a CD by Steve Earle. Snow was melting in mild rivulets, and not everything was possible but much ...
Micah's Story.(Short story)
Jun 22, 2007; ... <Text rich="yes"> On my arrival at boarding school in Colbrook, New Hampshire, my classmates assigned me to a small band of Third Form pariahs: two Jews, a lad whose leg had been withered by polio, and an ostensible queer. It was, I accepted, understandable. We four stood apart--one stood ...
Cecropia.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2007; ... <Text rich="yes"> <Preformatted type="other"> To even try to describe the terrible voltage of those pheromones--emitted in pulses plagiarizing the human heartbeat's blank iambic a few hours before dawn--would be to fully understand raw need, desires soft dank underbelly. To think of it as ...
Objects in the Mirror.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2007; ... <Text rich="yes"> <Preformatted type="other"> I'm tired of being like the bee who's duped into mating with Ophrys orchids mimicking winsome female bees, only to discover a bee's not a bee and I'm nothing more than a glorified pollinator. Isn't it better to be an insect who pretends to be a ...
Paintings by Avram Dumitrescu.(Painting)
Jun 22, 2007 ... <Text rich="yes"> [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]Caption: AVRAM DUMITRESCU<Italic>Marfa Pizza Foundation</Italic> , 2006acrylic on card, 23 1/3 in. x 33 in.[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]Caption: AVRAM DUMITRESCU<Italic>Godbold ...
En Route.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2007; ... <Text rich="yes"> <Preformatted type="other"> They looked so familiar I said <Italic>hello</Italic> before I sat beside them-- as if I'd passed them on some road, jostling their way to this impromptu meal and feeling so glad that they've wound up here--though it isn't really where they ...
Everything.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2007; ... <Text rich="yes"> <Preformatted type="other"><Bold>I</Bold> Somehow we found this place downtown called the Grape, or the Vine, a wine bar that'd serve a fifteen-year-old if he was dressed well and had good taste. Eighteen-year-olds, in our case, and for a couple of months we might as ...
Turkey Hunting.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2007; ... <Text rich="yes"> <Preformatted type="other"> was never something I wanted to do, but in those days, Dad and I were just getting close, and I told him I'd hunt--turkeys seemed like something I could stomach. They look too dumb even to piss, he said, but they're the smartest damn things in ...
Phosphorescence.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2007; ... <Text rich="yes"> <Preformatted type="other"> Only when I looked away did I wear a woolen cap and winter coat to confuse myself and give in to the rot and the decay of months and days of rain and mud seeping through the windows, and didn't I dream as always the most northern of the islands ...
Sometimes an Image.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2007; ... <Text rich="yes"> <Preformatted type="other"> A long time ago I dug their graves with sticks. I leaned my face upon them. I'm looking at the moon from our new home on the second floor. From our balcony of weeds the moon's at sea. It will never snow here and when it snows the farther that I ...
The Train to Ghent.(Short story)
Jun 22, 2007; ... <Text rich="yes"> How did you end up in Ghent?" Monique asked.Joseph watched her hand wave like a handkerchief through the smoke circling around the cramped caf and then pointed to her coffee saucer. "Could I have that sugar if you're not going to use it?""You can't ...
Near Dove Cottage.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2007; ... <Text rich="yes"> <Preformatted type="other"> Beaten, halfway up a hill trail from Grasmere, I dump my body on a rock and drop wads of bread into a pond. Minnows dart to the shallows smearing reflections of trees, their leaves splayed sunward like fervent hands. Somewhere in my past in a ...
Distilling.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2007; ... <Text rich="yes"> <Preformatted type="other"><Bold>I Setup</Bold> He picked you up when you were small, he rubbed a smudge of grease from around your eye, smearing a trail between the veins curling around your temples. He placed you on his feet so he could jig you around the bar's ...
Confessional.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2007; ... <Text rich="yes"> <Preformatted type="other"> I guess it's obvious it's me in those poems, even the ones when I break out of prison or just wake up--Jeez, how long have I been sleeping, red mud smelling like sulfur?--and a Mississippi kite shows up, alights in a blasted oak, then ...
Domestic Violence.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2007; ... <Text rich="yes"> <Preformatted type="other"> "Show me," I said to our companion, "what I have much coveted, your breast's mauve star." --SEAMUS HEANEY I looked up from sour grass in June when I heard my mother singing, or was it something else leaking from our living room as I ...
August 17, 2006.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2007; ... <Text rich="yes"> <Preformatted type="other"> I heard the whistle of winter blow as my chain saw howled in August inside the maple I felled last fall and let sit for a year in sections before sawing it into logs for splitting. My sweat mixed in with the maple, so I was acrid, acrid. Never ...
Transfigurations of Loneliness.(Critical essay)
Jun 22, 2007; ... <Text rich="yes"> <Preformatted type="other"> When music is not pedantry, as in Buxtehude, or gymnastics, as in Varse, or structure, as in the canons of Bach, it is the transfiguration of the loneliness its creator has come to acknowledge and live with. --BOBBY SCOTT ...