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Spring/Summer 2003

From the Editor
Thom Didato

Charles Baxter
interview

"The Wedding Present"
fiction by
Brock Clarke

"Deutsche"
fiction by
David Brizer

"Snow Powder"
fiction by
Josip Novakovich

"Impostor Theory"
"In Vivo"
poetry by
Mary Donnelly

"Old Bardstown"
"Growing"
poetry by
Ellen Hagan

"Smoke"
"Brother"
"Yellow-haired Girl with Spider"
poetry by
John Rybicki

"Please be aware..."
"How to Be Well Dressed..."
poetry by
Mónica de la Torre

"Rabun I"
"Rabun II"
"Keowee I"
"Tullulah"
paintings by
Peggy Bates

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Smoke

My arms around your neck in our huddle, no need to kneel in the mud to finger sparrow patterns for our flight across that field, where other boys pace and wait for us to bull up to the line and hike the ball. You and I notice that white breath pouring from our mouths--we're boys for Christ's sake, so why this urge to be fisherman, to gather our nets across our breath before it washes away? We smack hands and release, bull down at the line where you yank up from between my legs this fish, and you hurl it across the sky swimming from your basket to my basket while my sneakers kick back mud drops and friction, where that fish wiggles down into my arms and blows my body apart: my giant rolling to his feet in the end zone, and your breath pours out and my breath pours out on the other end of the field, and that breath makes a rope of light between us.

John Rybicki's main gig, his missionary work, is teaching creative writing to inner-city children in Detroit. He tours the land teaching students at various colleges and schools about the holiness of a sentence. Every day he falls in love with stuff like the slightest trembling of a leaf. His wife is his sun and moon and more. And when he isn't teaching, or hammering away at the page, he likes to roll around in the dirt doing carpentry.

His poems and stories have appeared in the North American Review, Bomb, Field, Ohio Review, The Quarterly, Alaska Quarterly, as well as in numerous anthologies. His first book of poems, Traveling at High Speeds, is out on New Issues Poetry Press. And he has a chapbook, Yellow-Haired Girl with Spider, forthcoming on March Street Press. His second book of poems is Fire Psalm.

TAHS
© New Issues
YHGWS
© March Street
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ShoulderBag

From our
poetry archive

“I Dream A Highway”
Maggie Smith
Issue 16 - Winter 2005

"Cypress Point"
Karyna McGlynn
Issue 13 - Spring 2004

Boyle

Marie Ponsot
Interview
Issue 7 -
Summer/Fall 2002