StringTown Magazine

Issue #1, 1998

In Memory of Peter Wiley

Price: $4.50

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Table of Contents

Cover Art by Heidi Fiechter: untitled, 1998

Julianne E. Adams, Remembering (excerpt)
Susan Collard, Keeping House
Peter Meinke, Nailbiters
Kathy Garlick, The Well
Steve Cleveland, White Zombie
Martin Marriot, when you walk up
Martin Marriot, the alien corn
Susan Collard, Who We Are
           Walking Backwards to Point O
Susan Miller, Chicken Money
Jeanette Lynes, The Tenant
Anne Splane Phillips, Letting the phone ring
Irene Wanner, Basic Birding
John Byrne, Spring Garden
Nancy Hoffman, I must confess to stealing my neighbor's fruit
Gregory Hischak, The Best for Last
Sherry Asbury, Melvin's Hat
Peter Meinke, Nor Iron Bars
John Byrne, A Sign in Two Languages
John McFarland, Colleen's Orders
Steven J. Quing, Climbing's Not a Metaphor for Life
Peter Meinke, Mountain Man
Alden Borders, Polar Bear
Adam Rovner, Specific Gravity
Susan Collard, Navigations
Alden Borders, Hood Canal
Kathy Garlick, Where Knock is Not
Jaimie Berg, Mystery Kitchen
Nancy Wilbur Woods, Praying, Alaska Style
Polly Buckingham, Outside My Window
Lorraine Healy, Snow and Moon
c.e. kavanagh, A Letter to Denise
Peter Wiley, Weather (excerpt)

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Excerpts

Julianne E. Adams

Remembering

That new crab, that older crab, that bigger crab
has been gone for days.
Wind has pushed soft body with pincers out
into mud flats and tidal pull.

Here, on the ribbed Salicornia, on the crosshatch
of rotting wood, salt grass and tipped-over pilings,
is crusted shell, bleached leg, sloughed skin.

There is a freedom in such loosening.

Peter Wiley

Weather

This
Is the saddest story
I have ever heard:

Slowly, there was snow
              that day
              through bright sun and,
While she joyously walked
              soundless through the
              sugared snow that fell
              in star-shaped whirligigs
              past the stricken trees,
She pondered her happiness
              coming across the orchard
              now to me
              among the dancing, sighing winds.
Her happiness as she
              saw me smiling
              at the open door, lamp-lit,
And with my face
              shiny from the glowing
              fire on one side,
              and the blue and silver of
              the snow on the other, and
Drawing her in
              anticipating
              across the doorstep.
But then
Within the book-mused sharpness
              the snap of quarrel
              on a senseless note–
As snaps a lute-string
              in a disused room
              for what?
And then an ancient silence
Desolate, a bare domain, Hence nor?

A dreary thing is snow.
So cold, so grey against
              these tiny smoke-hid flames.
Alas!

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