Wondrous by Sarah Freligh I’m driving home from school when the radio talk turns to E.B. White, his birthday, and I exit the here and now of the freeway at rush hour, travel back into the past, where my mother is reading to my sister and me the part about Charlotte laying her eggs and dying, and though this is the fifth time Charlotte has died, my mother is crying again, and we’re laughing at her because we know nothing of loss and its sad math, how every subtraction is exponential, how each grief multiplies the one preceding it, how the [...]

First Memory Long ago, I was wounded. I lived to revenge myself against my father, not for what he was-- for what I was: from the beginning of time, in childhood, I thought that pain meant I was not loved. It meant I loved.   Louise Gluck

Love After Love by Derek Wolcott The time will come when, with elation you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror and each will smile at the other's welcome,and say, sit here. Eat. You will love again the stranger who was your self. Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart to itself, to the stranger who has loved you all your life, whom you ignored for another, who knows you by heart. Take down the love letters from the bookshelf, the photographs, the desperate notes, peel your own image from the mirror. Sit. Feast on [...]

State Fair Fireworks, Labor Day BY MARYANN CORBETT Look up: blazing chrysanthemums in rose shriek into bloom above the Tilt-a-Whirls, hang for a blink, then die in smoky swirls. They scream revolt at what the body knows: all revels end. We clap and sigh. Then, no— another rose! another peony! break, flame, roar, as though by roaring they might make the rides whirl in perpetuum. As though we need not finally, wearily turn, to plow back through the crush of bodies, the lank air, to buses that inch us, sweating, across town. As though we were not dropped in silence there to [...]

The Woman Who Turned Down a Date with a Cherry Farmer BY AIMEE NEZHUKUMATATHIL            Fredonia, NY Of course I regret it. I mean there I was under umbrellas of fruit so red they had to be borne of Summer, and no other season. Flip-flops and fishhooks. Ice cubes made of lemonade and sprigs of mint to slip in blue glasses of tea. I was dusty, my ponytail all askew and the tips of my fingers ran, of course, red from the fruitwounds of cherries I plunked into my bucket and still—he must have seen some small bit of loveliness in walking his orchard with [...]

Rain BY IAN POPLE A lexicon of words that were not said in childhood, and all of those that were, were said beside an upturned boat, lapped planking of the creosoted shed, were said into the wind on tussocky ground, by farm-rust vehicles. The buildings I could not complete without my father’s help, the wind in which I was at sea. Rain blooming in August that moved the land and over land toward the autumn, sliding through the gates of summer, feeling for the bone inside the wrist.