February 2010
3 posts
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Letter from the editor
You said Emmet loved pigs, gave thanks for pigs at Thanksgiving Day dinner, longed to have a pig. The zoning laws made that impossible in St. Louis. So his parents arranged to have him own a pig which lived in Tennessee. He has pictures of his pig. He receives letters from the farmer about his pig. He puts aside part of his allowance to provide mash for the pig. And he is saving money and making...
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Human Beauty
If you write a poem about love … the love is a bird, the poem is an origami bird. If you write a poem about death … the death is a terrible fire, the poem is an offering of paper cutout flames you feed to the fire. We can see, in these, the space between our gestures and the power they address —an insufficiency. And yet a kind of beauty, a distinctly human beauty. When a winter storm...
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Prologue
I lost an arm on my last trip home. My left arm.
And I lost about a year of my life and much of the comfort and security I had not valued until it was gone. When the police released Kevin, he came to the hospital and stayed with me so that I would know I hadn’t lost him too.
But before he could come to me, I had to convince the police that he did not belong in jail. That too time. The...