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Spring/Summer 2012

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Poetry Selection – Jefferson Adams, Apology from a Small Garden Beside Railroad Tracks

It is dark here, and my lines
Grow crooked as the untended vines
That have sewn the garden walls
And now threaten the trains.

The trains do pass.
Two directions.
Nothing at all like the garden vines
Or the slow encroaching grass.

There are signals and tables
And the obvious rising of lights.

When trains move over steel rails
Below endless high wire,
There is a measure of power
To capacity. A strong appeal
To the parallel.

The simplicity is deceptive.
Order always decreases.
Let the garden continue,

Everything human needs tending.

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Fiction Selection – Alberto Alvaro Rios, from The Other League of Nations

The crazy people had a convention, people later said, and tried to laugh it off. But it was true.

Without prior advertisement, there took place one day in this town a chance gathering of the left-minded. It was a coincidental meeting of those who were famous in this town, prominent in their human loudness as the oblong fruit of retardation and cruelty, and of laughter. Everybody knew them. But nobody said so.

In this way they were ghosts, some of them. Or perhaps all of them. They were ghosts at very least in that nobody saw them. They had the meat of invisibility. And nobody noticed when they were gone, as they were never there to begin with. It is the trick of small towns.

Today, however, they were all here, recognizable as the single-walkers, those who owned the last four hours of the night. They were the bothersome ones who sometimes knocked on the door, loudly, as if to come home or to ask where lunch was, and who were then shushed away in no particular direction.

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