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FIELD #82

(Spring 2010)
 
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Contents

Bob Hicok

Forays into life saving
School days

Dore Kiesselbach
Song
Umpire
Jesse Lee Kercheval
Letter in an Envelope
Laura Shoemaker
Instances of Generosity
Forcing House

Olvido García Valdés
Translated by Catherine Hammond

Came
Listens
We
Frannie Lindsay
Sixty
Philip Metres
from Along the Shrapnel Edge of Maps
Dixon J. Jones
Repatriarch
Elliott Highway
Rebecca Hazelton
“This heart that broke so long”
“Such are the inlets of the mind—”
Ryan Boyd

This Was How She Came to Dinner

Eric Pankey
The Creation of Adam
As of Yet
Michael Dickman
Ralph Eugene Meatyard: Untitled
Angela Ball
Lots of Swearing at the Fairgrounds
The Little Towns Hoist on One Shoulder
Heather Sellers
Woman without a man with a bicycle without a fish
Sarah M. Brownsberger
First Love
Ghassan Zaqtan
Translated by Fady Joudah
A Going
The Dead in the Garden
Amaranth Borsuk
History of Song
Voir Dire
Bruce Beasley
Extremophilic Magnificat
Aimée Sands
Gangle and Boot
Wheel and Turn and Startle
Sarah Green
Prayer
Marjorie Saiser
I Am Done Raising a Son
Stephen Gibson
Ghosts
Memorial Sonnet
Tony Trigilio
Insomnia
Carol Potter
Auction
Emmanuel Moses
Translated by Marilyn Hacker
from Preludes and Fugues Cycle II
Molly Brodak
Recurring Dream
Scene from an Unknown Painting
Christopher DeWeese
XLVIII
XXXIV
Christopher Todd Matthews
Window Washer
Nothing Terribly Biblical About It
Lance Larsen
To a Cricket
Anna Journey
When I Reached into the Stomach of a Fistulated Dairy Cow: Sixth Grade Field Trip to Sonny’s Dairy Barn
Christopher Howell
Ghosts
Jung Doubts

Poetry 2009: Five Review-Essays
DeSales Harrison
Millennial Ephemera (Arthur Sze, The Ginkgo Light)
Pamela Alexander
Marten or Hare: The Future of the Past (Linda Bierds, Flight: New and Selected Poems)
Martha Collins
Hitched to Stars (Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, ]Open Interval[; Sharon Bryan, Sharp Stars)
Dave Lucas
Of One Lip (Kathy Fagan, Lip)
David Young
Two Old Guys (Jack Gilbert, The Dance Most of All; Philip Levine, News of the World)

 

 

SCHOOL DAYS

There was this girl
at tightrope walking school
afraid of heights.
She wanted to be a lion tamer
but generations of her family
had worked the wire, even the dogs.
In our discussions by the quarry, I contended
you can’t tame lions,
you can only make them afraid of chairs
and whips. This, however,
wasn’t her vision: the lions
would ascend their pedestals, roar when asked,
open their mouths for her head
and eat her in the end. The New Circus,
she called it, and fell the next day,
the day after that, the day after that.
When they took her leotard away,
she circled the tent, touching the canvas
with her open palms. We were young.
I couldn’t afford a lion
so bought her a kitty, kissed her
on the cheek where the net
had left its mark. Sometimes
when I’m up there, waiting to step
into nothing, I think of the rocks
we threw over the fence into the quarry
that we never heard land.
They’re still going, she’s still going,
the lions are still at it,
I’m twelve, lifting her shirt
as she lifts mine, our chests
almost identical
confusions, I’m about to do
what I don’t know how to do
every second of my life.

--Bob Hicok

Copyright © 2010 by Oberlin College. May not be reproduced without permission.

GANGLE AND BOOT

What a plain man you are, plain like a hand-cranked
sifter, its worn red knob and the futility
of trying, oh plain like applesauce, strained
and sweet, the tang of the stubborn
pulp after pressing, you know, the pattern
you make with tin cookie cutters, the flaps
of dough you leave hanging. I’m like that too,
the marrying of the scorned and lonely self,
the lid of the bread bin drawer that squeaks
when you slide it back, no one
uses that now, but I can smell the crumbs
from those old, stale years, rescue inconceivable,
the raisin maid dark in her red box
where your shame lies, and mine;
This is a kind of rescue, isn’t it:
the dog-brown honesty in your eyes,
your common threads, that plaid flannel shirt,
the stray hairs above your first button.

--Aimée Sands

Copyright © 2010 by Oberlin College. May not be reproduced without permission.


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