Issue 16

Post Road Magazine – Issue #16 | Spring/Summer 2009

FICTION:

Chris Stops the Boys Dawsen — Wright Albertsen
Whatever Happened to Harlan? A Report from the Field —
David Hollander
The Doctors — Kirsten Menger-Anderson
The Day They Were Shooting Dogs — Samuel Reifler
Body Language + Balloons and Clowns and Popcorn + Mash —
Kim Chinquee
Monster — Rebekah Frumkin
My First Real Home — Diane Williams
Transformations — Alice Hoffman

NONFICTION:

Birthday — Kim Goldberg
Farewell — Laura Didyk
Little Orange Bottles — Jeremy Rice
Hold Your Horses the Elephants Are Coming — Christopher Higgs

CRITICISM:

Tiny Monuments: A Look at Snapshot Photography — Hannah Lifson
Slow Freeze — Laurah Norton Raines
Rara Avis: How to Tell a True Bird Story — Jackson Connor

POETRY:

What We’ve Forgotten — Lorraine Healy
Suite for the Twentieth Century (for Carole Lombard) + Suite for the Twentieth Century (for Marilyn Monroe) — Joseph Campana
Cretaceous Moth Trapped in Amber (Lament in Two Voices) + Palinode for Being Thirty-four — Katrina Vandenberg
Dreaming of Rome + While Reading Pico della Mirandola’s Oration on Human Dignity — John Ruff
My Older Brother, June Bug + Name I Will Never Forget — Jason Lee Brown
Die Fledermaus + Sisyphus in Paradise — G. C. Waldrep
Breathless, My Venom Spent, I Lay Down My Weapons + Horoscope — Sarah Murphy
What They Don’t Tell You About Breast-Feeding + What I’m Not
Telling You — Liz Scheid

ART:

Portraits in Plasma Judith Page

THEATRE:

Excerpt from Gint (an adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gynt) by Will Eno

ETCETERA:

Conversation: Marion Ettlinger — Adam Braver
Journal: Black Rock City Journal — Len Goldberg
Journal: (Unexpurgated) Tour Journal Wesley Stace, John Wesley
Harding, and George Fisher (of Henley)

RECOMMENDATIONS:

Mikhail Bulgakov — Robert Olen Butler
Digressions on Some Poems by Frank O’Hara, by Joe Le Sueur — Allison Lynn
Spin, by Robert Charles Wilson — Yael Goldstein
William Faulkner’s “The Bear” — Allen Morris Jones
The Promise of Failure, or Why You Should Drop Everything
You’re Doing and Read Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road
Right Now! — John Mc Nally
A Sport and a Pastime, by James Salter — Noy Holland
Happy All the Time: Loving Laurie Colwin — Margo Rabb
Kerouac’s On the Road at Fifty — Morris Dickstein
The Laws of Evening, by Mary Yukari Waters — Tod Goldberg
October Snow, by Samuel Reifler — Nelly Reifler
The Dog of the Marriage, by Amy Hempel — Perrin Ireland
More Real Than Reality: The Frozen Art of Alistair MacLeod — Jon Clinch
A Far Cry from Kensington, by Muriel Spark — David Leavitt

CONTRIBUTORS

MY FIRST REAL HOME

by Diane Williams

In there, there was this man who developed a habit of sharpening knives. You know he had a house and a yard, so he had a lawnmower and several axes and he had a hedge shears and, of course, he had kitchen knives and scissors, and he and his wife lived in comfort.

Within a relatively short time he had spent half of his fortune on sharpening equipment and they were gracing his basement on every available table and bench and he added special stands for the equipment.

He would end up with knives or shears that were so sharp they just had to come near something and it would cut itself. It’s the kind of sharpening that goes beyond comprehension. You just lean the knife against a piece of paper.

Tommy used to use him. Ernie’d do his chain saws.

So, I take my knives under my arm and I drive off to Ernie’s and he and I became friends and we’d talk about everything.

“I don’t sharpen things right away. You leave it – and see that white box over there?” he’d said. That was his office. It was a little white box attached to the house with a lid you could open and inside there were a couple of ballpoint pens. There was a glass jar with change. There were tags with rubber bands and there was an order form that you filled out in case he wasn’t there.

He wasn’t there the first time I came back, at least I didn’t see him.

I went up to the box and those knives were transformed.

As I was closing the lid, he came up through the basement door that was right there and we started to chat and he has to show me something in the garden, so he takes me to where he has his plantings. It’s as if the dirt was all sorted and arranged, and then, when I said he had cut his lawn so nice, he was shining like a plug bayonet.

All the little straws and grass were pointing in one direction.

“I don’t mow like my neighbor,” he said.

Oh, and then he also had a nice touch — for every packet he had completed there was a band aid included. Just a man after my own heart. He died.

I was sad because whenever I got there I was very happy.