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FIELD #88

(Spring 2013)
 
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Contents

Joseph Campana

Vanya
Lease

Erin Malone
Letter Never Sent
Letter from Egg Lake Road
Heather Sellers
Retrobade
Ralph Burns
Birthday
Whose Voice Do You Listen For?
Christopher Todd Matthews
A Boy Will Be an Expert on His Grandma's Purse
Frannie Lindsay
Elegy for My Mother
Against Rapture
Michael Chitwood
The Good Old Days
Richard K. Kent

Lines Written on the Day before the First Snow

Richie Hofmann
Abendlied
Imperium
Elton Glaser

First Anniversary
Life by Misadventure

Richard Robbins
God Particles
Pen
Sylva Fischerova
translated by Stuart Friebert
Elba
Lee Sharkey
Equations
Mark Irwin
Moment
Arthur Sze
2'33"
Midnight Loon
Emily Vizzo
Island Stories
Fig
G. C. Waldrep
Tanmacnally
Bruce Beasley
from The Mass of the Ordinary
Sandra McPherson
The Tiny Landscape and How It Is Worthy
Bern Mulvey
The Memory of Now
Eclipse
George David Clark
Heimlich for a Heavenly Windpipe
Ray Amorosi
The Hills
Only Amber
Edoardo Sanguineti
translated by Will Schutt
"The Aeolian Harps Do Not Play for You"
"That One Who Sleeps"
Rosalie Moffett
Self Portrait with Scratch Ticket
Mark Neely
[first a forest burned]
[slow and stately survives]
Lindsay Turner
Apology
It's Not Raining and It's Not Not Raining
Angela Ball
On the Subject of So-Called Forgiveness
Methods of Choice
Anna Journey
Asymmetrical--
Reasons Why Licking the Anesthetic Backs of Waxy Monkey Tree Frogs Could've Made Me Stand Living in Texas
Mike White
Break
Ark
Marci Vogel
And the Hours, They Felt Like Years & the Years, Minutes
Angie Estes Dessert
John Gallaher

In a Landscape: XIII
In a Landscape: XV


Poetry 2012: Five Review-Essays

DeSales Harrison
The Memory I Am, the Memory I Follow (Yves Bonnefoy, Second Simplicity)
Jessica Grim
Denatured Form (Evelyn Reilly, Apocalypso)
Pamela Alexander
The Art of the Art of Falconry (Andrew Feld, Raptor)
Kazim Ali
Attempted Treasons: Some Notes on Recent Translations (Translations from Hafiz; Osip Mandelstam, Stolen Air; Marina Tsvetaeva, Dark Elderberry Branch; Alice Oswald, Memorial)
Martha Collins
Some Madness Is (Steven Cramer, Clangings)

 

 

VANYA

There's always a pistol, always a play
always some second-rate characters:

a theatre sifting dust, tea cooling
in gnarled hands, in gnarled hands

in the country, in the endless afternoon.
Cards click down their fatal caricatures

only to rise and fall and shuffle back
all the same. Where is the orchard?

Where the city? Oh my lost one you
exhaust me I could be anything why

won't you kiss me? We cut down all
the trees again. We covered the streets

with song. There is no room for what
I should say to you. There is only time

observing you as if from great darkness
as you wait and wait and wait and repeat.

Someone's leaving. You never catch him.
Someone's taking off. There's nothing here

to take away.

--Joseph Campana

Copyright © 2013 by Oberlin College. May not be reproduced without permission.




ELEGY FOR MY MOTHER

But I still have my river-mother
and all of her glittering fish,

my sycamore-mother who never is cold,

my star-white mother whose eyes
need no closing,

whose wind-stripped hands need not crochet,

whose dove-plain dress does not rip
on the drag of the gutter's wind,

whose kicked-off galoshes never lined up
with all the black pumps of the mothers
of Morningside Avenue,

my mother whose fiddle has two
curved hurts for its f-holes,

magnolia-mother shedding her petals of snow,
tearless November mother refusing soup,

leaving her wig on the steps
for the grackles to nest in,

my broad-boned mother, my corduroy
notre dame of the worn knees,

mother of sidestroke stillness
and loose knots,

my mother who blurs from the effort
of being remembered.

--Frannie Lindsay

Copyright © 2013 by Oberlin College. May not be reproduced without permission.


 

THE GOOD OLD DAYS

Here on these few streets
people are known for their faults,
a liar, a skinflint, a woman
who sings too loud in the choir,
but they are known.
This is what everyone in big cities
wants to get back to
or that's what they say
though they don't come back.
The pie is really toothsome at the diner,
there's that.
And just the right number
of flies for the occasional waving away.
If you are passing by
you might think you are being waved to,
now who was that,
I know I know him.
Oh yes, he made his boy
carry buckets of water from the house,
the wire handles biting into his hands,
and pour them into the creek
for laughing in church.
The creek did not swell,
not even slightly.

--Michael Chitwood

 

Copyright © 2013 by Oberlin College. May not be reproduced without permission.


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