Numéro Cinq

I will never forget the decency, kindness and camaraderie that have characterized NC’s inner workings. You are an astonishing tribe. I am eternally grateful.

“What do you know of life?” I ask him real soft, touching his lips with mine. “What does a man like you know of the sea?”

All will be love in the warming waters, the subduing horror, the coming of nothingness.

I walked, then, to put myself at the feet of living and submit to human beings, to open myself and fail to welcome entirely the lonely glints returned in eyes as I went past.

He crosses out that paragraph, writes in a choked scribble I am falling in love with lostness.

And she said, “Yes, I knew what he was like, but I thought he was kidding.”

reaching / toward narrative but not necessarily / approving of the reach

They were locked in airtight roles, waging a futile war to maintain a status quo that damaged and reduced them both. Compassion and sympathy – love itself – had no room to breathe,

…the most dangerous part of returning, that poetic possibility, the dangerous and fake nostalgia all poetry entails.

-In the charged company of thugs, the skull both breathes and barks.

I would watch her plump, small mouth talk and talk and think of penises she sucked and I would get jealous. I wanted to kiss that mouth.

Sometimes, even if there is no explanation in the words, or the explanations do not explain, at least I find a container and the possibilities of containers that might provide a context…

To bear the unsayable agony / of the lovers seated on an anthill…

…overloading of the book with cultural value that had led to feel-good white liberal complacency regarding race.

My goal is to generate a feeling of joyful apocalypse.

Her anachronistic organs cramped; as with heart and soul. Her love organs could not interlock, her working organ went kaput. If a glance could kill! Alas, it couldn’t.

…working hard on both poetry and her love life, less so on her reputation.

Lovely new coffins are headed my way, / full of the finest young men. / Pleasure to see them, simply a joy –

At that, the girl’s father jumped up, lifted the boy from his chair, snapped him in half over his knee, and threw him on the fire.

For the artist, wasting time, which the French perfected, is called discipline.

Slap me good and hard with mortality while I’m strong. / My body wants to run as though it’s seen a ghost.

Three times during the night, her face turns to mine. It’s always the face first, or is it the hands, so subtle they make the drawing near of all else both possible and necessary.

The journey during which truths are revealed.

Rome is burning. Every day it catches fire somewhere. On the edges a spark blazes up in the vibrating air, in its place a blue ghost-flame quivers and burns a hole into the map.

They were known principally for the clarity of their communication, having abolished speech, leaving them only writing.

She wonders if the Red King was a figure in her dream or if she was a figure in his dream.

Every biographer, in possession of the exact same sources, must find an entirely different character.

I wanted to possess Captain Midnight’s decoder, the latent, undisclosed landscape of potentials, things in their nascent state on the way to being realized.

Atticus Finch and Sven Mary share a desire to defend the outcasts of their respective societies.

beneath the enormous sky of Anáhuac, / they walk, / they drag themselves, / with their bowl of horror in their hands, / their terrifying tenderness.

He reads his life’s unfolding as if it were an entry in a dictionary of North American childhood, a dictionary with a narrative logic and sensibility, as if every experience were representative…

Key dimension of Saunders’ realism is the absurdism embedded within it: a natural discovery given the inherent absurdities of American culture.

Zoppe knew that the best escape route was through his head. That was the place where he found all the lost scents of his childhood.

Go back to storm warning and rain delay. / Go back to parchment, papyrus, vellum. / Go back to land line and gravel driveway. / Go back to blent, unbent light, pre-prism.

She is the poem that has drowned my soul to its last drenched flower.

In the business of Indian-white relations, place names remain as blunt reminders of our ancestors’ legacy of conquest.

The future will be old. It may be bright and shiny, terrible and wonderful but, if we are to be certain of anything, it will be old.

He lured him to the back of his hotel and butchered him. When they found the head, it had tears in the eyes.

The middle is rife with references. / Can only really be named long long after, / when end begins to whinny its arrival. / And no one will want that name.

This is the Last Call issue because it is the final issue.

A retrospective series of touchstone texts, pieces that define the magazine’s underlying aesthetic, the ideal toward which we have always aspired.