The Southern Review articles from January 2005

The Southern Review archives from January 2005

Editor's note.(Editorial)
January 1, 2005... Welcome. I have to admit that, as the new editor of The Southern Review, I come to the honor of guiding one of the most important and respected journals in American history with more than a little fear and trembling. Yet at the same time I...

Backwater.(Poetry)(Poem)
January 1, 2005... Backwater I used to think backwater meant remote or backward, out of date, a place of stagnant poverty. But found the term in history meant across the mountain watershed where rivers run the other way to...

Immune.(Poetry)(Poem)
January 1, 2005... Immune In far back mountain coves they say that walking barefoot in the snow, the first snow of the season, will prevent you catching colds all year. Ten minutes stepping through the woods will do the work, as...

Background Radiation.(Poetry)(Poem)
January 1, 2005... Background Radiation Here at sunset the prehensile tendrils of the pole beans are translucent as twists of optical fiber. Last rays flood the horizon and pull away into the outer dark. The glow beyond the hills...

Elements.(Poetry)(Poem)
January 1, 2005... Elements When my older sister stopped using vowels, she was treated like an invalid. She was served bowls of brothy soup on a tray, as if she'd had her tonsils out. My mother continually ushered me from her room swatting my...

Amnesiac.(Poetry)(Poem)
January 1, 2005... Amnesiac Nothing echoes like a hospital. Souls come and go here. Pumping machines tether broken-down shacks of flesh. Down the hall a grown woman calls for her mother. You sit for hours beside my bed with its...

Monet Going Blind.(Poetry)(Poem)
January 1, 2005... Monet Going Blind It's like the art of making a woman blush from across the room, that kind of looking-- hollowing, aggressive-- but internalized now, so that even as he feels the light ...

The raft.(Fiction)(Short Story)
January 1, 2005... HE LEFT THE MUSEUM intending to get a cab but they sped by on Fifth, uninterested in his hand in the air. He'd come to New York alone to turn fifty and this shunning of his hand made him sadder than he already was, and sadness from such a small...

Yellow Star.(Poetry)(Poem)
January 1, 2005... Yellow Star He saved it like a captured butterfly, A medal decorating a box of yellowed black And white snapshots, a souvenir of his first Lost life, infernal and exquisite, a flared match His hand could tolerate just...

Tristan.(Poetry)(Poem)
January 1, 2005... Tristan It's poison seeping from his radio, The music he'd rather die than hear, Which reminds me most of my grandfather, How at the first strains without lifting His yarmulke-covered head From his book, he made...

Soup.(Poetry)(Poem)
January 1, 2005... Soup Anyone else would have looked like she felt Two feet tall had you walked in on her plucking What remained of a chicken from the garbage, But not my father's ancient already hunched-up aunt. Instead, unflappable,...

Photograph of Mass Grave Unearthed, Rwanda.(Poetry)(Poem)
January 1, 2005... Photograph of Mass Grave Unearthed, Rwanda After Auschwitz, to write a poem is barbaric. --THEODOR ADORNO It takes a year for a body to purge itself Down to bones. A photograph never loses Its soul, interest...

My Grandmother Crosses the Gobi Desert.(Poetry)(Poem)
January 1, 2005... My Grandmother Crosses the Gobi Desert Summer 1900 At first, the others thought it was better in the endless gravel, even though camels shook their heads and spit at wind tumbling over dunes my sister called white...

Another Poem about Memphis Rocking.(Poetry)(Poem)
January 1, 2005... Another Poem about Memphis Rocking A lot of people thinks that the devil has come here. --account of the New Madrid Earthquakes, 23 January 1812 Only the devil can turn water against its course, bring a lake ...

Play It Again.(Poetry)(Poem)
January 1, 2005... Play It Again The clock vine sprawls along the fence, threatens the thin flag hoisted on the neighbor's mailbox. My hammock ticks another notch in the porch, licks the white paint. I know it is like this,...

Viewing.(Poetry)(Poem)
January 1, 2005... Viewing The truth is I really don't know how absence turns the inside out, chalks a line around the space a body occupies: the dark spot above the fish nest and then the rest of the...

Vigil.(Poetry)(Poem)
January 1, 2005... Vigil When the dead enter your dreams, they don't speak. Their bodies are sluggish-- week-old balloons tied to a bedpost. They linger just outside your peripheral vision. You keep waking up bruised. The...

A painted face.(Fiction)(Short Story)
January 1, 2005... MY SISTER TELLS ME LIEU'S TAXI RIDE will be free of charge today. Three years I've been a driver for her and this is the first time anyone has ridden for flee. I am to take him to Bien Hoa and wherever else he wants to go, all day if necessary,...

The Bridges Are Gone.(Poetry)(Poem)
January 1, 2005... The Bridges Are Gone Dogs and cats are missing. At the levee she and Damon watched a car door tumble past and a kitchen chair with two legs. The bridges are gone. Cables trail from sheared pilings like spider...

To My Father.(Poetry)(Poem)
January 1, 2005... To My Father Two roads converge at a yellow light and as the signal autumns into red I see you in a car not new but clean and sensibly small We are as usual headed different ways you young enough to be my son...

To Cocks' Eggs.(Poetry)(Poem)
January 1, 2005... To Cocks' Eggs Wednesday at the market I pry an egg carton's spongy latch the coffered cardboard gray rough as poured cement but soft and somehow comforting then to see if any shell leaks gold run two...

To You for the Last Time.(Poetry)(Poem)
January 1, 2005... To You for the Last Time Today I saw your body at the gym dressed as you dressed it in thick gray socks and shapeless shirt hung from your shoulders as if to dry your hair the same hard brown pulled back and...

At Boris's on the Outer Beach.(Poetry)(Poem)
January 1, 2005... At Boris's on the Outer Beach The tides are worthless, though I pretend to read their comings and goings. What use is the art of balance? Shimmer distracts me, the great waste of shine poured this way and that. In...

Faithful.(Poetry)(Poem)
January 1, 2005... Faithful And what about the secret soul? My joy is its lack of definition, its mute refusals. It's a dance, isn't it--the girl at the heart, the tipped balance of shine I recognize in my own baby eyes ...

Burial.(Poetry)(Poem)
January 1, 2005... Burial Later he died, and it was then I think I began to give sense to every motion I had not heeded. Already I could no longer kill an ant, a wasp, without some smallness setting in: the burden of my own hunger ...

Termite, 1959.(Fiction)(Short Story)
January 1, 2005... HE SEES THROUGH THE BLUE and it goes away, he sees through the blue and it goes away again. He breathes, blowing just high. The blue moves but not too much, the blue moves and stays blue and moves. He can see into the sky where there are no...

The Unwearing: a Benediction.(Poetry)(Poem)
January 1, 2005... The Unwearing: A Benediction Then, at last, when machines shut down, the crank and clatter of their work quiet at this long shift's end, when the bobbins are empty, whistles have stopped blowing, freight has...

Dixie Cups at the Bra Party.(Poetry)(Poem)
January 1, 2005... Dixie Cups at the Bra Party You're eyeing the nut dish on the coffee table, looking for excuses, when Diana says, It's your turn. Diana is popular and seventeen. So are Connie, Lou, Suzanne, and the Shepard twins, ...

Four Pieces of Severance.(Poetry)(Poem)
January 1, 2005... After careful study and due deliberation it is my opinion the head remains conscious for one minute and a half after decapitation. --DR. DASSY D'ESTAING, 1883 In a heightened state of emotion, we speak at the rate of 160 words per...

"Shreds and patches": a note on the portraits.(portrait drawing)
January 1, 2005... One is never satisfied with a portrait of a person that one knows. --GOETHE WHEN I WAS STUDYING DRAWING in college, first at Auburn University and then at the University of Chattanooga, my greatest discomfort came when professors...

Service Station, Tennessee.(Poetry)(Poem)
January 1, 2005... Service Station, Tennessee Even a man of God sometimes runs out of prayers. But with his pretty wife and girls there with him, all their bodies locked inside that loose-rod car, Thornton couldn't think that he might...

Free Masons at the Door.(Poetry)(Poem)
January 1, 2005... Free Masons at the Door Every black Mason with a sugar jar of savings had a little less money after those two men knocked. Those tar-seared men. Folks said in Cuba Negro men's faces could hold their own shape....

Farm Bureau Advisor.(Poetry)(Poem)
January 1, 2005... Farm Bureau Advisor They suggested that the man who taught them not to choke fields with tight turns of growing but to sometimes let them breathe as deeply as uncorseted girls, the one black man they ever knew the...

We were two rooms of one timber, but I left that place alone.(Poetry)(Poem)
January 1, 2005... We were two rooms of one timber, but I left that place alone Sara, widow, 31 Henry pulled our heartwood along the rutted street that town stood beside, built two rooms and called them home. My Henry did that. There....

Dead Man.(Poetry)(Poem)
January 1, 2005... Dead Man for Harold Steele I saw a dead man once--a man I hadn't known-- he was as gray as the corpse of Christ in Giotto. And men came riding through the night, their jackets bunched against the windows of Greyhound...

A single awe.(Fiction)(Short Story)
January 1, 2005... And [I] understood, in the endless instant before she answered, how Pharaoh's army, seeing the ground break open, seeing the first fringed horses fall into the gap, made their vows, that each heart changes, faced with a...

Inheritance.(Poetry)(Poem)
January 1, 2005... Inheritance Before the house is leveled, I sort their possessions, room by room. Springs and weights slide inside broken clocks, and maps open to lacework where mice have chewed through. I try to clean a wooden...

The Other Boy.(Poetry)(Poem)
January 1, 2005... The Other Boy Once ice seizes the reservoirs and lakes, stories come from the next town, or the next, about a boy who falls through. Each survivor underwater longer than the last: two minutes, four minutes, nine. Men...

Thief River Falls.(Poetry)(Poem)
January 1, 2005... Thief River Falls If you want to know, I tired of it, too: damp furniture and the repetition of cold, the two of us clenched in a knot under blankets taken from the hospital. Was it two years ago the ice storm came?...

Trinidad Cove.(Poetry)(Poem)
January 1, 2005... Trinidad Cove We got up early and drove out past the timberyard and the company town where the houses you once painted warp and peel in fog. The rain was misting when we reached the cove, its pine trees reaching off...

Russian Dolls.(Poetry)(Poem)
January 1, 2005... Russian Dolls He made do with a garden small as a tennis court. When he'd started he thought of a soccer field. But hoping for food from clay in three months' time was stupid. His dream had been a truck farm without the...

Running out of time: a memoir.(motion and the writing of poetry)
January 1, 2005... Today the road all runners come, Shoulder high we bring you home And set you at your threshold down, Townsman of a stiller town. --A. E. HOUSMAN, "To an Athlete Dying Young" ALTHOUGH AT THE TIME I made no...

Sfumato.(Poetry)(Poem)
January 1, 2005... Sfumato The galleries were like cities peopled by madonnas and madmen, and the cities were under siege from marvelous instruments that showered the populace with cobblestones in delicate, fountaining arcs. ...

Setiembre.(Poetry)(Poem)
January 1, 2005... Setiembre a Alejandro Oliveros Mira setiembre: nada se ha perdido con fiarnos de las hojas. La juventud vino y se fue, los arboles no se movieron. El hermano al morir te quemo en llanto pero el sol...

September.(Poetry)(Poem)
January 1, 2005... September for Alejandro Oliveros Look at September: it has lost nothing by entrusting its leaves to us. Youth came and went, the trees didn't budge. Your brother's dying burned you with weeping but the sun...

Debo Estar Lejos.(Poetry)(Poem)
January 1, 2005... Debo Estar Lejos Debo estar lejos porque no oigo los pajaros. Me ha extraviado la tarde en su vacio, he recorrido esta ciudad de voces extranjeras solo para advertir cuanto dependo de sus cantos, y como...

The Birds Have Shut Up on Purpose.(Poetry)(Poem)
January 1, 2005... The Birds Have Shut Up on Purpose I must be far off because I do not hear the birds. In the vacuum the afternoon has misled me; I have sifted this city of alien tongues only to notice how much I depend on...

Defined by Negatives.(Poetry)(Poem)
January 1, 2005... Defined by Negatives Not now the fine thought, a spill of whistle notes trilled to a pitch of the passionate past. No more the tight ream spun to a sum that will not balance. Fierce indignation is best understood ...

Hothead.(Poetry)(Poem)
January 1, 2005... Hothead He could name all these, wildflowers of the Mournes, and because there was a story to be told, he could pull through breast and brains the way they took these names from a distant past, a past before there rose a...

Campbell.(Poetry)(Poem)
January 1, 2005... Campbell in Gaelic, Cathmhaoil, meaning crooked or twisted mouth "I shall never deny those who came to this knarled coast with a skinful of sopped hope and started with their brood this trail that would become the...

Storytelling and the alpha narrative.(the teaching of creative writing)
January 1, 2005... When I arrived at the University of Washington in the autumn of 1976 to teach in its creative writing program, I was a twenty-eight-year-old published author of fiction faced with the task of deciding what a fiction workshop should be. Nearly...

Woman at the Well.(Poetry)(Poem)
January 1, 2005... Woman at the Well The bucket hangs by a wheel and a web, a rope waits to be lowered into water as black as the eyes of a man who nodded, looking straight at her when he spoke, asking about her five husbands...

Your Father's Song.(Poetry)(Poem)
January 1, 2005... Your Father's Song Your mother's legs lift to the changing moon, your father's beard as dry as straw, and you are left, imagining the song he sang to you. And you wonder if the tale is true: of Aphrodite born...

Itinerant Guest.(Poetry)(Poem)
January 1, 2005... Itinerant Guest And when esophageal cancer enters their house and makes itself at home, and then there are three of them at the table, watching TV, and in the queen-size bed, and the excitement that always comes with...

As It Turns Out.(Poetry)(Poem)
January 1, 2005... As It Turns Out, esophageal cancer was the least of it. Installing the feeding tube ("routine, a piece of cake," the cocky doctor said), they nicked an artery. He bled internally for days before his legs and...

Her.(Poetry)(Poem)
January 1, 2005... Her And when his wife is gone and he's alone at last to do whatever it is he wants to do without her interference, her fine moral objections to TV, say, or fast food, or just sitting doing nothing, he...

Why Bugsy Siegel was a friend of mine.(Fiction)(Short Story)
January 1, 2005... IN 1947 NICK HAUSER AND I had only two loves in this world--baseball and Cheerio yo-yo contests. That's how we met Benny, one spring night after a doubleheader out at Buffalo Stadium on the Galveston Freeway. His brand new Ford convertible, a...

A Ghost in the Piazza.(Poetry)(Poem)
January 1, 2005... A Ghost in the Piazza I was gone like a breath. I breathed myself away. What kept me gone, for however short a time, was the sound of strangers' voices in the street, stoneworkers building a sluiceway down a hill with...

Eclogue.(Poetry)(Poem)
January 1, 2005... Eclogue The field across the road is beautiful. I can't describe it. I went walking out just now to see it. There was a huge white bird that settled in the tree beside the fence. Another swooped around on great brown...

With the Blackest of Inks.(Poetry)(Poem)
January 1, 2005... With the Blackest of Inks At night the panther, who is lean and quick, is only a pair of eyes and, with a yawn, momentarily, a long, pink tongue. Mostly ...

Children, It's Spring.(Poetry)(Poem)
January 1, 2005... Children, It's Spring And this is the lady whom everyone loves, Ms. Violet in her purple gown or, on special occasions, a dress the color of sunlight. She sits in the mossy weeds and waits to...

Prince Buzzard.(Poetry)(Poem)
January 1, 2005... Prince Buzzard Prince Buzzard, I took you, so high in the air, for a narrow boat and two black sails. You were drifting in the depths of the air wherever you wanted to go, and when you...

Pushing and pulling.(Essays and Reviews)(Book Review)
January 1, 2005... Tender Hooks by Beth Ann Fennelly. New York: W. W. Norton. $23.95 (cloth). Dog Angel by Jesse Lee Kercheval. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. $12.95 (paper). A Deed to the Light by Jeanne Murray Walker. Urbana and Chicago: University...

"Lonely impulse of delight": one reader's childhood.
January 1, 2005... EVERY READER HAS TWO LIVES--one public, the other secret. The public life is the one visible to our teachers, friends, and families, though none of them ever sees it fully. It consists of our homes and houses, schools and schoolmates, friends...

A Room Somewhere.(Brief Article)(Poem)
January 1, 2005... A Room Somewhere Suppose I had a ticket in my pocket right now. Say there is a room somewhere, with chocolates on the pillow and covers turned down in the language of welcome. My potential, that elusive...