The Southern Review articles from June 1994

The Southern Review archives from June 1994

Mouse rampant. (short story)
June 22, 1994... IT HAD BEEN a deeply unsatisfying spring. In the five years Phil had lived in Clinton, Montana, there had never been one like it: unseasonably cold, relieved by rain and sleet. The old-timers saw it as a sign, redemption from the greenhouse...

A happy vacancy. (short story)
June 22, 1994... THERE ARE PERILS in life so disturbing that we need to hold ourselves in a state of readiness, ever alert to exercise our sense of outrage or disbelief. Yet even these events must be dealt with and understood. Worse than the events themselves...

Search and rescue. (short story)
June 22, 1994... IN THE DREAM, I arrive at an airbase somewhere twenty years after having flown an airplane. I have long forgotten procedures and instrument markings that I once knew by heart. The problem in the dream is that I'm scheduled to fly at say 8:30...

Petrified wood. (short story)
June 22, 1994... I'D GIVEN up on understanding why I was doing the things I was. The other night I went out on my deck, it must have been after two in the morning, around two or three. It's a big redwood deck that wraps around three sides of the house, upstairs...

Peace. (short story)
June 22, 1994... Late afternoon on Ethan's veranda, sipping the last of the Glenfiddich out of jelly glasses, the brothers attempt to numb themselves in lieu of recovery. It's September dog days, ninety degrees in the shade, and they're slumped in their chairs,...

Yellow snow. (short story)
June 22, 1994... THE HISTORY OF THE DUPLICITIES of my ex-husband Stefan Erikson, if I wrote them all down, would be as thick as one of those impossible books with a title that begins with the word decline: Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, say, or Decline...

News of God. (poem)
June 22, 1994... Pre-dawn, late February. Lines of uniforms and the voices of boots, base streets a second flesh of ice. There's little to do this early but half-step and pray. He's short, Butch, in the rear of the column, says later that he sees me falling to...

The whore is born in Texas. (poem)
June 22, 1994... It starts with the butts we're field-stripping in a rolling motion between thumb and index finger, tobacco and filter floss scattered in no special direction onto flat squadron lawns. Someone's told us to police the area. The first black guy I've...

The politics of spit. (poem)
June 22, 1994... Without our uniforms, the haircuts betray everything: we're servicemen, and enlistees since no one gets drafted into the Air Force, which makes us doubly hated in Champaign, Illinois in 1974. It's the Ray-Bans and white-sidewall,...

Except I shall see. (poem)
June 22, 1994... Black-maned, black-tailed, a gray horse stands tied to a locust tree outside St. Thomas. Inside, in the usual pew, his white-haired master bows his head as the organ plays Brahms, "My Heart Abounds with joy," but hard as he prays he cannot dodge...

Rat. (poem)
June 22, 1994... At first it was a mere suspicion of a smell, maybe an onion or potato gone rotten under the stove, but in three days grown to a rich, sourceless crescendo of downright stink that came to fill the entire house, though by month's end it had...

A fan reminds me of a morning long ago. (poem)
June 22, 1994... The fan watches over us, its one eye moving back and forth, back and forth all night. And it's the night, with little cocoons of air, that keeps us safe. Even Faulkner, who stayed up most nights, would have known how conclusively good it is to...

Triggering Corinth, NY. (poem)
June 22, 1994... Come March, the grandmothers gather in the First Methodist basement to cook Easter eggs for the children of Corinth. In turbans and aprons, they suck smoke through long cigarettes. They hover in a blue haze above cauldrons of muddy chocolate,...

The American Civil War. (poem)
June 22, 1994... The blood & piss the lock of hair sent home with a white rose, & gangrenous suppurations, breeches filled with the dead's shit, the lock of Ramseur's hair Custer sent home to his enemy's beloved wife who had just birthed their first child, a...

The beautiful daughter. (poem)
June 22, 1994... Skinhead leaned out of a truck, & spat. Oxford autumn, 1982. Sputum on my cheek. He & the driver laughed, & took off. I'm not even Asian, or black. I'd entered gates & seen spires, walked Magdalen Bridge & looked down into marshes of historical...

A heart attack in the men's shower. (poem)
June 22, 1994... I think, in my nakedness. Firemen, black boots and coats shunting off the light, stand by law at the scene. The formal composition congealed in the shadowless frame of the showers should be a painting by David. Nude men lounge against tile,...

At the hunter's stew. (poem)
June 22, 1994... Off with the tail: bottlebrush, the old gray bush, the twitching curl. Cleaned, they look even more ratlike than their babies do; that should be clue enough to tell you. Their opposed incisors clip through oak, wires, and the erst-while plastic...

Pastoral. (poem)
June 22, 1994... Nowhere does the moon find a home. The hounds, under her full-bellied sway, howl once before their long legs, free and glad of the deep snow, take them to the pond. We follow. All the white world breaks on the stark gray the geese throw toward...

Aubade. (poem)
June 22, 1994... Dressed up and not looking half bad if I say so I saw Ilona because it was sunny that day In her dull dress in springtime in her yard by my tram stop In Budapest and every last tree in town in bloom tralala And she was big as a tree herself but...

Shunga warriors. (poem)
June 22, 1994... The penis is a dragon, rising from the green eloquence of silk and the stroking brush. In the shunga prints by Kuniyoshi assiduous courtesans strain to wedge this blunt beast into their intricacies. Somewhere above, at ridiculous angles, the...

Seeking the hook. (poem)
June 22, 1994... with its barbed point digging into the soft palate just behind my lower teeth I am dragged along the mud and rock-strewn bottom for forty feet, then pulled up, drawn toward the light as I twist and yank my head side to side and the hook lodges...

Old self. (poem)
June 22, 1994... "Many American men... do not have enough awakened or living warriors inside to defend their soul houses." --Robert Bly I chanced across my old self today. He was sitting in the second-floor office where I used to work; at the typewriter, thin...

Fever journal. (poem)
June 22, 1994... Dakotah Territory: September 22, 1992 Bates, Bates, God damn Robert Bates, last night I dreamed of you and that time we jumped in that irrigation ditch down past Campbell ranch and grabbed foot-long carp with our bare hands and threw them on the...

Vigil. (poem)
June 22, 1994... Rose, you are the winter oak whose spent leaves redden and remain, limp emblems of the heart's accustomed hold on this--the known life of seasons, daylights, nightfalls, weathers--the ordinary calendars, mean time. Ordinarily we live our lives...

Tongue and groove. (poem)
June 22, 1994... They meet in a movie in which she stars as the one on the bottom. He is the one on the top. This goes on for what seems a long time. Then they swap partners or positions or pink body parts, all in an effort to achieve a believable rhythm of...

The American side of the falls. (poem)
June 22, 1994... My father was tough, a mechanically-minded ruffian who talked fast and found his god in a beautiful boat. For boats were everything in Buffalo, the early '60s when the Erie Canal and Great Lake hadn't yet become a sludgy flow of sewage, slime,...

On being dismissed as a pastoral poet. (poem)
June 22, 1994... The mounds of pocket gophers punctuate these prairie stutterings of growth: willow and poplar and cottonwood, bluestem grass--and look, a little slip of a cowslip pokes up from the muddy fringes of a creek. The market value of such local...

Preliminary designs. (poem)
June 22, 1994... When you actually build it, it calls for repair, spackle, cedar, tiny hardware. But not to know how to build! Only to design! A fantasia. In the lookout tower: rotating, sky-lit, circular compartments, glassy clean surfaces, a museum's unmessy...

Training horses. (poem)
June 22, 1994... You are alone with Alone, and it's his move. --Robert Penn Warren Once in a while, if I lie still and am quiet, I can still feel the trembling, prehistoric, galactic static between stations I used to listen to for patterns as a kid. Marci...

Heraclitus, Fragment 16. (poem)
June 22, 1994... There's a lot of night to skim over. By dusk the lake is prematurely night, as if this half of earth can't wait to receive its portion of the dark, and we are what's acutely wrong with this picture, we and our borrowed craft are out of place...

Turner's 'The Slave Ship.' (poem)
June 22, 1994... J. M. W. Turner based his painting on an account of what occurred on the slave ship Zong in 1781. Luke Collingwood was captain, and he sailed with a crew of 14 and a cargo of 400 slaves. During their passage from Africa to Barbados, an...

One life. (poem)
June 22, 1994... This one happened to be Siamese, on its back On the front balcony steps, and this time I stopped And was combing its belly like a wheat field swept Back and forth by a storm, and it was still rippling As it squirmed off the planking Two stories...

Leaving a freshman at college. (poem)
June 22, 1994... Those cautious, territorial people pushing through the door after us hadn't been there before either. They approached the way we did, bearing their trays before them like the facts of their lives, or a god's offering--coffee, bread. Clan by clan,...

That finished feeling. (poem)
June 22, 1994... Wrong words brought them together outside the steel mill bar of tired, nervous men, wrong words to the wrong man, wrong street, wrong night the blood so near their skin this man full of iron ingots' heat and this other good man in their rage...

As me and Addie lay dying. (William Faulkner and southern women)
June 22, 1994... THERE IS A country song about what it takes to make a country song. Certain elements are required: Mama must be mentioned, and jail, and a train, and a mule, and God and/or the Bible. Somebody has to have cheated, and somebody has to be...

The reports from the River Styx.
June 22, 1994... The River Styx is not a myth. It's not a figment of poetic imagination. Nor is it a metaphor for the stark dividing line between life and death. No one can dabble fingers and toes in a metaphor and get them wet. The time has come to set the...

William Faulkner and Southern History.
June 22, 1994... JOEL WILLIAMSON, a historian well-known for his examination of southern race relations since the Civil War, has brought his historical knowledge, his skills as a detective, and his insight into the southern psyche to bear on one of the major...

Eclipse Fever.
June 22, 1994... In some writers, genius, intelligence, some indomitable obsession conspire to imprint their works on our minds. Think of Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett. Think of Thomas Bernhard, nearer at hand, and of his admirer, Walter Abish....

After the Rain.
June 22, 1994... Cleveland: Cleveland State University Poetry Center. $15.00 (cloth). CYNTHIA ZARIN'S SECOND COLLECTION, Fire Lyric, has no image so arresting it sears its way into the brain, no one poem so visually striking that it stands in stark,...

A Silence Opens.
June 22, 1994... New York: Alfred A. Knopf. $20.00 (cloth). CYNTHIA ZARIN'S SECOND COLLECTION, Fire Lyric, has no image so arresting it sears its way into the brain, no one poem so visually striking that it stands in stark, memorable relief once the book...

Calling His Children Home.
June 22, 1994... Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press. $18.95 (cloth). CYNTHIA ZARIN'S SECOND COLLECTION, Fire Lyric, has no image so arresting it sears its way into the brain, no one poem so visually striking that it stands in stark, memorable relief...

The God of Indeterminacy.
June 22, 1994... Urbana: University of Illinois Press. $11.95 (paper). CYNTHIA ZARIN'S SECOND COLLECTION, Fire Lyric, has no image so arresting it sears its way into the brain, no one poem so visually striking that it stands in stark, memorable relief once...

New and Selected Poems.
June 22, 1994... Boston: Beacon Press. $14.00 (paper). CYNTHIA ZARIN'S SECOND COLLECTION, Fire Lyric, has no image so arresting it sears its way into the brain, no one poem so visually striking that it stands in stark, memorable relief once the book has...

The Run of the House.
June 22, 1994... Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. $30.00 (cloth). CYNTHIA ZARIN'S SECOND COLLECTION, Fire Lyric, has no image so arresting it sears its way into the brain, no one poem so visually striking that it stands in stark, memorable...

Stained Glass.
June 22, 1994... New York: W. W. Norton. $17.95 (cloth). CYNTHIA ZARIN'S SECOND COLLECTION, Fire Lyric, has no image so arresting it sears its way into the brain, no one poem so visually striking that it stands in stark, memorable relief once the book has...

Fire Lyric.
June 22, 1994... New York: Alfred A. Knopf. $19.00 (cloth). CYNTHIA ZARIN'S SECOND COLLECTION, Fire Lyric, has no image so arresting it sears its way into the brain, no one poem so visually striking that it stands in stark, memorable relief once the book...