SPRING ISSUE AVAILABLE NOW

    Front cover:
    KARA WALKER
    Signal Station, Summit of Maryland Heights, 2005

    The Darker Powers, a poem by Carl Phillips

    Even if you're right,
    and there's in fact a difference
    between trouble unlooked-for, and
    the kind of trouble we pursued…

    Godzilla versus the Smog Monster, a story by Lucy Corin

    Patrick is fourteen, this is earth, it's dark, it's cold out, he's
    American, he's white, straight, not everyone has cell phones, he's
    sitting on the carpet of the TV room on the third floor holding the
    remote in both hands of his lap…

    Displaced Persons, an essay by J. Malcolm Garcia

    I am desperate for water.
    "No shade," I tell my Afghan colleague and translator Masood.
    He shrugs and gets out of our car and I follow him past a ruined
    metal gate into Sakhi, a camp for the homeless outside Mazar-e
    Sharif in northern Afghanistan…

    The Translator I, a poem by Polina Barskova, translated from
    Russian by Catherine Ciepiela

    We flounder through powdery snow
    Siamese t-t-
    Twins bound by the tongue's sweet saliva,
    My round-the-world dawns break inside you over you…

    Adhesion, an essay by Pete Duval

    If what Father Carlos, the guest master at Gethsemane, tells us
    holds true – that God is most himself when he's silent – maybe I'm
    not so far from understand him as I thought. God has been silent
    in my life…

    The Apartment, a story by Yoojin Grace Wuertz

    The day before he died, my son called his sisters, their husbands,
    his aunts and uncles, and told them thank you, he had been loved.
    He had been given a sign, he said. It was over, or almost, and he
    wanted them to know…

    Silk Road, a poem by Peter Balakian

    for Agha Shahid Ali
    (1949-2002)

    I drove in snow to Clinton.
    My car slid into a field of stubble.
    Cows appeared and disappeared in drifts…