Issue 07

Post Road Magazine – Issue #07 | Fall/Winter 2004

POETRY:

A Confederacy + Mr. Sweatner’s Parade — David Daniel
The Nineteenth-Century Novel + The Nineteenth-Century Novel II — Eve Grubin
A Hunger So Honed + Self Portrait as the Letter Y — Tracy K. Smith
The Lais of Lost Long Days + Stripped from the Waist Up, Love Olena — Kalytiak Davis
Cellist + Dogs Resembling Their Owner — Peter Jay Shippy

Three Months, No Kidding + Salt — Alison Stine

NONFICTION:

Sea Monsters — Kate Crane
The Middle-Aged Man and the Sea — Larry O’Connor
Third Street. Stambaugh, Michigan: Late Spring, 1972 — Chad Faries
City Storms — Jeffrey M. Bockman

CRITICISM:

On the Aesthetic Agenda of the Antiwar Movement, by Lori Cole

ART:

Mary Armstrong: Paintings — Introduction by Claude Cernuschi
Stoney Conley: Paintings — Introduction by Claude Cernuschi

FICTION:

Dream Children — Edith Pearlman
Since It’s You — Peter Brown
What We Do — Mat Johnston
Untitled as of Yet — Sarah Nankin
Activist — Andrew Richmond

THEATRE:

Note to Post Road Readers — Jonathan Ames

RECOMMENDATIONS:

Middlemarch by George Eliot — Donna Morrissey
The Savage Girl by Alex Shakar — Henry Presente
Italian Days by Barbara Grizzuti Harrison — Karl Iagnemma
Plant Life by Pamela Duncan — Lynn Pruett
Antarctica by Claire Keegan — Michael Lowenthal
Robert Walser — Kevin Canty
Open Doors by Leonardo Sciascia — Peter Orner
Michael Byers and The Coast of Good Intentions — Roy Parvin
True Grit by Charles Portis — Tom Franklin
Three Australian Novelists — Sabina Murray

ETCETERA:

Index: Lolita A-Z
Interview: April Bernard — Reb Livingston
Reprint: Henry James on Turgenev

A Hunger So Honed
by Tracy K. Smith
from Post Road 7

Driving home late through town
He woke me for a deer in the road,
The light smudge of it fragile in the distance,

Free in a way that made me ashamed for our flesh–
His hand on my hand, even the weight
Of our voices not speaking.

I watched a long time
And a long time after we were too far to see,
Told myself I still saw it nosing the shrubs,

All phantom and shadow, so silent
It must have seemed I hadn’t wakened,
But passed into a deeper, more cogent state of dream–

The mind a dark city, a disappearing,
A handkerchief
Swallowed by a fist.

I thought of the animal’s mouth
And the hunger entrusted it. A hunger
So honed the green leaves merely maintain it.

We want so much,
When perhaps we live best
In the spaces between loves,

That unconscious roving,
The heart its own rough animal.
Unfettered.

The second time,
There were two that faced us a moment
The way deer will in their Greek perfection,

As though we were just some offering
The night had delivered.
They disappeared between two houses,

And we drove on, our own limbs
Sloppy after that, our need for one another
Greedy, weak