A Tidings of Magpies

by Connie Wanek We used to play, long before we bought real houses. A roll of the dice could send a girl to jail. The money was pink, blue, gold as well as green, and we could own a whole railroad or speculate in hotels where others dreaded staying: the cost was extortionary. At last one person would own everything, every teaspoon in the dining car, every spike driven into the planks by immigrants, every crooked mayor. But then, with only the clothes on our backs, we ran outside, laughing.

Your Family’s Farm, Empty by Nick Lantz "Buildings can't want."—Donald Rumsfeld Neither does the ax regret each tree it has bitten, though it leans against the shed like a drunk locked out of his own house. The tractor doesn't moon over the physique of its youth. The dry birdbath makes no plans for the future. What can the barn recall of the day you climbed the ladder into its loft and found a pair of buzzard chicks skulking among the hay bales? Your grandfather shot them with a pistol and kicked them out of the haymow for you to carry to the ditch beyond the field. Does the barn remember those shots exploding inside it like a burst neuron? The weight of those bodies thudding to earth? Can the field remember your feet crossing it, the air heavy with crickets? Does the ditch remember the bones the coyotes gnawed and scattered? You stand here, where the walnut tree was felled, one foot on the smooth disc of...

by Faith Shearin If winter is a house then summer is a window in the bedroom of that house. Sorrow is a river behind the house and happiness is the name of a fish who swims downstream. The unborn child who plays in the fragrant garden is named Mavis: her red hair is made of future and her sleek feet are wet with dreams. The cat who naps in the bedroom has his paws in the sun of summer and his tail in the moonlight of change. You and I spend years walking up and down the dusty stairs of the house. Sometimes we stand in the bedroom and the cat walks towards us like a message. Sometimes we pick dandelions from the garden and watch the white heads blow open in our hands. We are learning to fish in the river of sorrow; we are undressing for a swim. please note: photo art by Keith Woodmancy

( HoneyHaired has left for Greece .) by Thomas R. Smith It's like so many other things in life to which you must say no or yes. So you take your car to the new mechanic. Sometimes the best thing to do is trust. The package left with the disreputable-looking clerk, the check gulped by the night deposit, the envelope passed by dozens of strangers— all show up at their intended destinations. The theft that could have happened doesn't. Wind finally gets where it was going through the snowy trees, and the river, even when frozen, arrives at the right place. And sometimes you sense how faithfully your life is delivered, even though you can't read the address.

The tragedy is, I still move like the Maybelline dancers...

by Colum McCann "What Corrigan wanted was a fully believable God, one you could find in the grime of the everyday. The comfort he got from the hard, cold truth--the filth, the war, the poverty--was that life could be capable of small beauties. He wasn't interested in the glorious tales of the afterlife or the notions of a honey-soaked heaven. To him that was a dressing room for hell. Rather he consoled himself with the fact that, in the real world, when he looked closely into the darkness he might find the presence of a light, damaged and bruised, but a little light all the same. He wanted, quite simply, for the world to be a better place, and he was in the habit of hoping for it. Out of that came some sort of triumph that went beyond theological proof, a cause for optimism against all the evidence. "Someday the meek might actually want it," he said.

by Seamus Heaney And some time make the time to drive out west Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore, In September or October, when the wind And the light are working off each other So that the ocean on one side is wild With foam and glitter, and inland among stones The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit By the earthed lightening of flock of swans, Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white, Their fully-grown headstrong-looking heads Tucked or cresting or busy underwater. Useless to think you'll park or capture it More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there, A hurry through which known and strange things pass As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.