Issue Three – February 2002

Paintings

By Sylvia Chesley Smith

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Nesting

By David Halpern

They watch from the hilltop as the doe pats a nest in the tall grasses between two trees. A year ago they watched a goat birthing in the barn. They stood on either side of the goat, helping her, talking to her, but it was not the same. The barn was warm and dry. The goat had a name. There was no nest.

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Balm of Gilead

By Heather June

Mrs. Sharply owned a bicycle but not a car. This was not unusual in a college town like Boulder, but Mrs. Sharply was. You don’t see much of old people in Boulder, you tend to see the young and beautiful. Her true age was a secret, but people said it was well over eighty.

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Turning Points

By The Editors

For there is a boundary to looking.
And the world that is looked at so deeply
wants to flourish in love.

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Tattoo Emporium

By Kip Robinson Greenthal

My daughter Mattie calls me from downtown and says she needs my signature so that she can get a tattoo. She is sixteen, and she needs to be eighteen to get one. I am unhappy about this, but I get in the car anyway and drive to where she has asked me — the Tattoo Emporium.

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Current Events

By Marcia Simpson

An old woman should pay attention. Why, just this morning she’d thrown two crabs back because their shells were soft; thrown them right where it was too shallow and one landed on a rock and cracked its shell. Bad. A waste, and anyway, what right did she have? Pay attention, Bekah.

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The Savior

By Laurie Parker

Christine Walker locked her apartment door and called out good night as she passed her landlady’s son Santiago and his ‘posse’ working into the night as always, even on Christmas Eve, auto-mechanics able to transform a seemingly ruined carcass into a gleaming road trophy in a matter of hours.

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