Demons are easy to spot: tornadoes that level wholesome Kansas towns, gales that isolate the Northwest coast, droughts that fill tent camps with refugees. But how a saint will move, a single cloud that sails above a front or flies the other way, that’s not even noticed until some nun looks up from prayer to … Continue reading
Tag Archives: Volume 42
Union County Sunset — William Jolliff
I suppose we might thank Hollywood for this: you can sit on the bench at the corner of Consolidated and Corn-Town Road and watch a child with iron-pierced lips flag down a Harley and wrap tattooed arms around a born-to-be-wild wife-beater, then ride off into what used to be called a sunset—until the evenings gave … Continue reading
The End of the Day — Ann Struthers
To watch the sunset at Wadi Rum We ride across the desert on benches in the back of the 1950’s pick-up past the petroglyphs on the red rocks to the outcroppings sanded smooth by eons of time with sand in their teeth. The princes in their long sheepskin cloaks, fleece turned to the inside, whirl … Continue reading
Planting the Sand Cherry — Ann Struthers
Today I planned the sand cherry with red leaves – and hope that I can go on digging in this yard, pruning the grape vine, twisting the silver lace on its trellis, the one that bloomed just before the frost flowered over all the garden. Next spring I will plant more zinnias, marigolds, straw flowers, … Continue reading
The Road to Work — Ann Struthers
The Latin Professor lives in the country drives a little red pickup, fills its box with grass seed, Omalene for his horses, the Georgics of Virgil. The philosophy professor drives a big black pickup. He carries Heidegger, Sartre, Derrida and Foucalt. He needs wide tires, eight cylinders. The German professor rides his bike, his saddlebags … Continue reading
Phlebas the Phoenician — Ann Struthers
Phlebas the Phoenician, once as handsome and as tall as you, fills all the glasses. He can write in Ugarit’s forgotten script, it’s bird-track characters metamorphosed, into these signs I learned in nursery school. He pours the Johnny Walker Black over crackling ice. Does it matter that Richard the Lion Heart is rotting in prison? … Continue reading
Dancing Among Women, American and Kuwati Women at Mai’s Party — Ann Struthers
When the door closes behind the Sheik Mai whips off her head covering, as do the other women, shaking loose their thick, black hair. Like nuns freed from their habits and coifs, they come to life, chatter like birds. –even the old grandmother tries her few words of English. I try my Arabic. After the … Continue reading
Coleridge and Wordsworth’s Gang — Ann Struthers
Coleridge, scholar, was reading Spinoza, so when Walsh, reliable spy sent by the Home Office, quizzed locals, “Who? Why? tramping about? taking notes on the sly!” Coleridge found out and renamed him Spy Nozy. Suspicious “Sett of Violent Democrats gathered around Tom Poole, surely a gang,” Walsh reported. Poole’s and Coleridge’s names were known as … Continue reading
Mother and Marmee — Ann Struthers
When Abigail Alcott died, Louisa May and her father prepared to publish her journals- she of the grey cloak and unfashionable bonnet worn like her principles, the first paid social worker in America who reported to the rich benefactresses that she found the Irish immigrants dirty, ragged, hungry, that her investigation of causes showed that … Continue reading
Alcott’s Axe — Ann Struthers
Thoreau found “incessant labor with the hands the best way to remove palaver from one’s style.” Borrowed an axe from Alcott to cut timbers for his cabin. Alcott was more loquacious than sparrows, his prose prolongating as his rambles, random, thick as purple thistles on his farm. Thoreau felled enough trees, trimmed, barked, and notched … Continue reading
Coe Review 