The Southern Review articles from June 2002

The Southern Review archives from June 2002

Note.(Poem)
June 22, 2002... It is with considerable complexity of feeling that we announce that the present number of The Southern Review will be the final one to bear Michael Griffith's name on the masthead as Associate Editor. Since he came to the journal as Assistant...

Fall.(Poem)
June 22, 2002... Fall Ruby-red ones, Macouns, Fujis, Cox Orange Pippins, Northern Spys, and farther down, A row of antique English varieties, Russets Burnished gold, fit for the distraction, the fruit Aphrodite lent to Hippomenes to...

Second Act.(Poem)
June 22, 2002... Second Act From a primeval forest, the pine boards, Twenty-foot-long understatements that He tipped up to the second floor of the Carriage house hayloft and levered in. Their grain too torqued for ship's masts, ...

My Friend Steve Asks If I Believe in the Afterlife.(Poem)
June 22, 2002... My Friend Steve Asks If I Believe in the Afterlife --Catherine Ellen Chirls died September 11, 2001, WTC When the boy delivering her eulogy first uttered "mother," a baby sparrow landed on his head. The boy reached up...

Back East Out West with Roger Williams.(Poem)
June 22, 2002... Back East Out West with Roger Williams I have not hid within my breast my soul's belief; and although sleeping on the bed either of the pleasures or profits of sin thou thinkest thy conscience bound to smite at him that...

Watching Bill's New Lover Prepare Our Evening Meal.(Poem)
June 22, 2002... Watching Bill's New Lover Prepare Our Evening Meal Not much, really, has changed. The San Anselmo sun streams still into the room, so bright it almost blinds. And, yes, here still, the vast array of...

Pansy.(Poem)
June 22, 2002... Pansy So I've come to love the flower whose name some jerk shouted at my brother as we walked past. Beneath my dormant rose, it alone bears the weight of snow. Pensees. Thoughts no less...

Evening Primrose.(Poem)
June 22, 2002... Evening Primrose "Statutory flower," I tease my husband as he leans in close and softly blows into a still half-open bud. "Be patient, would you," I whisper as she quivers to full blossom...

Chronicle of Hammer.(Poem)
June 22, 2002... Chronicle of Hammer My ancestors were fiery rocks that boomed from heaven. With me grave thunder lords drove rain hard inside the seed. After a storm the smell of metal. I was pried from fields and lashed to sticks and...

The Height of Summer.(Poem)
June 22, 2002... The Height of Summer Old death is so beautiful--so very beautiful-- We will die together--I know-- --Zelda Sayre, letter to Scott Fitzgerald, 1919 The secret to picking blackberries is eating them at once. Bike in...

Unending.(Poem)
June 22, 2002... Unending We went to trouble ourselves in a place of heavy occasion. It was a wet March dawn. Sleet left pins on our coats as we lugged a suitcase up the subway stairs in former East Berlin, then got lost among...

Tobacco.(Poem)
June 22, 2002... Tobacco To rid yourself of envy and sin mix honey with tobacco. --Cuban folksong Tabaco, tu boca, tus bocas--your mouths, sweet island uncles, your lips fragrant with Cuban puros, and you ...

Playa Colorada.(Poem)
June 22, 2002... Playa Colorada It was a beach like all beaches, only perhaps more beautiful. And the sand was pink, not red. We would arrive in caravans, hampers overflowing with food and drink, like Aziz and his party on the...

My Emotions Are Like Fish.(Poem)
June 22, 2002... My Emotions Are Like Fish Mostly they live in the dark underwater weed-slithering currents and worry about being swallowed up by their more furious brethren. Some of them have eyes perched atop long...

A Line of Thought.(Poem)
June 22, 2002... A Line of Thought Its humble or noble origin is sketchy so far as I can tell, and the mostly blank slate of its past reveals few legible figures. In 1565, for example, the Swiss naturalist Conrad Gesner inserted a...

Hatchet.(Poem)
June 22, 2002... Hatchet What a gift, a dangerous baby in size, handle like a spine, a sleek, flattened S that fit the hand and remained perpetually cocked, ready. I could chop. Or knock with the blunt side. And I could...

Sumac.(Poem)
June 22, 2002... Sumac Trash trees, they grew in gangs at a useful field's edge. Lean, scraggly, they had the look of racket about them, trees that would mouth off, eye your sister then your mother, trees ...

Sound Kinetics.(Poem)
June 22, 2002... Sound Kinetics It dawned on me as we woke to Manhattan's sea-sound of traffic, how this is akin to what you hear, pressed like an ear to the shell of your mother, unable to match sound to moving bodies. I could tell...

The Neo-Natal.(Poem)
June 22, 2002... The Neo-Natal As the curtain open-sesamed on the glass chests of incubators--a dozen or so strewn in the cave of natal lights shining above the resting neonate-- I tried not to think of them as the glass caskets ...

Marking the Body.(Poem)
June 22, 2002... Marking the Body My doctor, a woman, knows how shyness Shrinks men gone vulnerable in the groin. She waits while they unbutton or unzip, Turns from me this morning, giving me time To excuse myself with a just-learned...

After an Unframed Original.(Poem)
June 22, 2002... After an Unframed Original Big Rock, Illinois, 1941 It must be August: Grandma's cotton dress summer-sheer and sun-dappled through the trees, Grandpa's shirtsleeves rolled over his brown arms. His hands are callused...

Mockingbird Counts to Ten.(Poem)
June 22, 2002... Mockingbird Counts to Ten A bird is a diabolic creation, half animal, half angel, rodent heart, cherubim wings, blood red as the Roman sky at sunset, Barberini bees circling the fort. One can never tell how life will...

The .38.(Poem)
June 22, 2002... The .38 for P. H. (1943-1962) The first time you unlocked your glove compartment and showed me your secret, I was breathless at what nestled in its box like jewelry. Then, slowly, I grew used to what rode with us,...

Sideshow.(Poem)
June 22, 2002... Sideshow What stopped us en route to Moesgaard Museum's Amazing Bog Man was unspectacular--an unearthed grave: the skeleton of a dog whose human had taken pains to fix its limbs as if it slept mid-chase. ...

The bald truth.(Poem)
June 22, 2002... The bald truth My hair went on a diet of its own accord. Rogaine is the extent of my vanity. It didn't work, but it was fun treating my head with fertilizer as if it were a phrenologist's lawn. They were on to...

The reception.(Poem)
June 22, 2002... The reception The bride's lifted on a chair and given to the ceiling; the groom's lifted on a chair as men make crickets of their tongues. Four kinds of wine, and the bouquet is thrown, a boy in the corner ...

Stone.(Poem)
June 22, 2002... Stone I was one of eleven at the funeral. The mother of my third wife's first husband. Every word of the priest sounded like the whisk of a broom. Being Jewish, I was distracted by the ribs of Jesus on the...

The White Pines.(Poem)
June 22, 2002... The White Pines They brought home the six-inch white-pine seedlings in the trunk of the white Impala with the ruby-red upholstery. My father's project was to change perhaps a quarter-acre of our yard into a private...

My Brother the Jew.(Poem)
June 22, 2002... My Brother the Jew My brother Albert is driving along one Saturday, and he passes this Orthodox friend of his and says, "Want a ride?" and the guy says, "Can't, it's the Sabbath," and Albert says, "It's OK, I'm...

Escape by Garbage, 1903.(Poem)
June 22, 2002... Escape by Garbage, 1903 Rotten peas and penguin blood, spoiled dried fish and coal ash. As the Antarctic days grow lighter, the ship's crew rakes out all its dark garbage across the ice, a dirty carpet spread from...

Rings of Fire.(Poem)
June 22, 2002... Rings of Fire The weepy slipnotes of "Last Date," the lovesick burns-burns-burns of "Ring of Fire"-- the soundtrack to forlorn sunny afternoons that summer almost forty years ago when Sally Dixon, who packed meat at...

(The Hermit Brother).(Poem)
June 22, 2002... (The Hermit Brother) My brother left the night of the first snow. He left his tracks in the clearing, and that Was all he left. Thirty-nine years have passed. It has snowed every night since. I have had My fill of...

The Retired Superhero.(Poem)
June 22, 2002... The Retired Superhero for Gregor Samsa One day all of his powers (super strength, invisibility, X-ray vision, and the ones that he hadn't quite figured how to use yet, the miraculous gift of speaking backwards, ...

The Retired God.(Poem)
June 22, 2002... The Retired God Most don't believe he is who he says he is, but he insists, taking great pains to prove what he says is true. He can still do what he claims to have done, calamities, plagues, miracles, the old dust...

Ways of Going.(Poem)
June 22, 2002... Ways of Going Will it be like hang-gliding-- gossamer takeoff, seedlike drifting down into a sunlit, unexpected grove? Or ski-jumping--sliding, soaring, ski tips piercing clouds, crystal revelations astonishing...

Glaucoma.(Poem)
June 22, 2002... Glaucoma The loss is slow to arrive-- a narrowing of the canals that lead from the eyes, and the edges erode, the peripheral field dissolves to a blurred haze of green and gray. The mailbox is gone, children...

Green Street.(Poem)
June 22, 2002... Green Street for Trisha A dirt road once, paved now--route into time and the world for some I knew a lifetime ago. And a tiny house here, another at the crest of the ridge where someone bootlegged across the span...

The Fox.(Poem)
June 22, 2002... The Fox Having run out of trying to change ourselves to suit each other, to smooth the grating edges, we barely inhabit the bare rooms, not speaking or looking when we pass going that way or this. This is the...

Ballooning.(Poem)
June 22, 2002... Ballooning They shimmered before crowds at the football game; cars at traffic lights saw them float, as if the glint had lifted off windshields, risen in wisps of mere light. They hung from trees, from telephone...

For My Mother, on Her Yearly Visit.(Poem)
June 22, 2002... For My Mother, on Her Yearly Visit --for Peg She's grown so thin the green garden coveralls fall in swags around her. This is what's left after caring so long for a man tangled in Alzheimer's. ...

A Small Commotion of Air.(Poem)
June 22, 2002... A Small Commotion of Air The sky pinks toward closure. Another maple leaf twists through a small commotion of air. My father, never one to give up easily, is trying to see the sky through his eyelids, ...

Minding the graves.(Poem)
June 22, 2002... I AM NOT ONE OF THOSE city women who claim that rape has nothing to do with sex, only with violence. On my farm, I own animals--male animals. A stallion, dog, tomcat, bull. Their mating behavior makes clear that nature consistently...

Children of Transylvania.(Short Story)
June 22, 2002... BEFORE BREAKFAST IN Doctor Petru Groza, as they were packing their bicycles, Joanna had screamed at her sisters, demanded they stop waiting for her along the route, had thrown a ferocious, bratty tantrum as she hadn't done once in the four...

Halfbaby.(Short Story)
June 22, 2002... HALFBABY'S ALWAYS BEEN HALFBABY like she came with the name. Maybe the island midwife gave her the name, she doesn't recollect clearly, fully, but she's Halfbaby just like Rockmother is Rockmother. But Rockmother didn't come with her name. The...

The saint of broken objects.(Short Story)
June 22, 2002... IN LLOYD'S TWENTY-SIXTH YEAR, he became clumsy. He'd just made Level III Manager, and they'd bought their first house, a Queen Anne in a safe neighborhood with good schools. First, he shattered the smoke detector while swatting a gypsy moth...

Dying light.(Short Story)
June 22, 2002... IT'S A SUNDAY AFTERNOON in early May. Bud McMahon, who's eighty-one and dying of esophageal cancer, has been to church with his wife, Annie. Friday they went to the clinic, where they were given the diagnosis. Tomorrow they have an appointment...

Blaze.(Short Story)
June 22, 2002... DREAMA WON'T VISIT NOW Oil account of the accident part. That bitch. So on visitors' afternoon I just watch dirty shadows the window bars make across the wall of my cell. There's voices all over the prison, penitentiary they call it, all the...

The Angel of the Airwaves.(Short Story)
June 22, 2002... THE TROUBLE WITH SIN was that once you started, there was no stopping. Moses Rosen had imagined that he would grow up to become a rabbi, and then, sixteen years old, his Knoxville childhood having slithered past in the waning days of the 1890s,...

Special section: "the margins and settings of life-narrative".(Brief Article)
June 22, 2002... The five essays that follow were originally delivered as talks at an interdisciplinary conference held at the University of Virginia in February of 2002. James Olney was a keynote speaker, and he returned with enthusiastic reports about what...

A private life.(diary of Duchess of Northumberland)
June 22, 2002... THE IDEA OF PRIVACY has considerable dignity in our society. Even those who, riding on a bus, talk loudly on their cellphones about their love lives often revere privacy as an abstract concept. Violating their own privacy by choosing to allow...

A life in the day of: ethnography and biography.
June 22, 2002... STEREOTYPICALLY, THERE IS not much to connect the modus operandi of an ethnographer, lost in some jungle, and a biographer, cozy in a library. The more I considered it, however, the more points of convergence I found, and this conference has...

On walls, veils, and silences: writing lives in Iran.(poet Forugh Farrokhzad)
June 22, 2002... YEKI BUD, YEKI NABUD: Persian stories always begin with this paradoxical phrase, which simply means "There was one, and there wasn't one." Throughout my childhood, "yeki bud, yeki nabud" was my key to a world of wonder and mystery. Like...

The Book of Margery Kempe; or, The Diary of a Nobody.
June 22, 2002... FIRST LET ME SAY that Margery Kempe, who lived from about 1373 to 1439 or later, was not a nobody. She came from the urban patriciate of Lynn (now King's Lynn), a thriving port in the most prosperous part of late-medieval England, East Anglia;...

The Mirror on the Wall.(autobiography)
June 22, 2002... I WANT TO BEGIN by describing the metamorphoses of title my paper went through, to give a sense of how the subject has evolved in my own mind. There were five possibilities I gave some thought to: "Poetry and Autobiography"; "The Two Private...

Homage: Donald Justice.(American poet)
June 22, 2002... I HAVE HEARD DON JUSTICE read his poems at least nine times over four decades in five different states. One of those readings, at Bread Loaf in 1985, was the best I've ever heard. In a hushed yet firm and clear voice, Don read with a musician's...

The rare balance.(The Traveler's Calendar by Daniel Mark Epstein)
June 22, 2002... NOW FIFTY-TWO, Daniel Mark Epstein has built a distinguished career as a poet, biographer, translator, and playwright. His work tends to be widely inclusive, bringing together rather than keeping separate his disparate interests--popular...

The future of American fiction.(four first-time authors)
June 22, 2002... TEN YEARS AGO, critic John Aldridge published a screed of a book entitled Talents and Technicians: Literary Chic and the New Assembly-Line Fiction. Aldridge's gripe is one lodged every generation by grumpy, out-of-the-loop elders: Young writers...