A Tidings of Magpies

Well, there were some long nights here in CinCity as many of us early morning working folk here in town have attended schools recently playing in the Sweet Sixteen. The Bearcats were thrilled to have been asked to the dance, but a little too young to stay for the entire event. The Wildcats though...the health and prosperity of life on Earth as we know it depends all on them. Stay strong, men!    Old Men Playing Basketball by B. H. Fairchild The heavy bodies lunge, the broken language of fake and drive, glamorous jump shot slowed to a stutter. Their gestures, in love again with the pure geometry of curves, rise toward the ball, falter, and fall away. On the boards their hands and fingertips tremble in tense little prayers of reach and balance. Then, the grind of bone and socket, the caught breath, the sigh, the grunt of the body laboring to give birth to itself. In their toiling and grand sweeps, I wo...

by Gary Young In the heat of late afternoon, lightning streaks from a nearly cloudless sky to the top of the far mesa. At dusk, the whole south end of the valley blazes as the clouds turn incandescent with some distant strike. There is a constant congress here between the earth and the sky. This afternoon a thunderstorm crossed the valley. One moment the ground was dry, and the next there were torrents running down the hillsides and arroyos. A quarter-mile off I could see a downpour bouncing off the sage and the fine clay soil. I could see the rain approach, and then it hit, drenching me, and moved on. Ten minutes later I was dry. The rain comes from heaven, and we are cleansed by it. Suddenly the meaning of baptism is clear to me: you can begin again, and we are saved every day.

May those that love us, love us. And those that don’t love us, May God turn their hearts. And if he doesn’t turn their hearts, May he turn their ankles, So we’ll know them by their limping.

by Anne Porter I never will have time I never will have time enough To say How beautiful it is The way the moon Floats in the air As easily And lightly as a bird Although she is a world Made all of stone. I never will have time enough To praise The way the stars Hang glittering in the dark Of steepest heaven Their dewy sparks Their brimming drops of light So fresh so clear That when you look at them It quenches thirst.

Looking for The Gulf Motel by Richard Blanco Marco Island, Florida There should be nothing here I don't remember . . . The Gulf Motel with mermaid lampposts and ship's wheel in the lobby should still be rising out of the sand like a cake decoration. My brother and I should still be pretending we don't know our parents, embarrassing us as they roll the luggage cart past the front desk loaded with our scruffy suitcases, two-dozen loaves of Cuban bread, brown bags bulging with enough mangos to last the entire week, our espresso pot, the pressure cooker—and a pork roast reeking garlic through the lobby. All because we can't afford to eat out, not even on vacation, only two hours from our home in Miami, but far enough away to be thrilled by whiter sands on the west coast of Florida, where I should still be for the first time watching the sun set instead of rise over the ocean. There should be nothing here I don't r...

Cheap Seats, the Cincinnati Gardens, Professional Basketball, 1959 by William Matthews The less we paid, the more we climbed. Tendrils of smoke lazed just as high and hung there, blue, particulate, the opposite of dew. We saw the whole court from up there. Few girls had come, few wives, numerous boys in molt like me. Our heroes leapt and surged and looped and two nights out of three, like us, they'd lose. But "like us" is wrong: we had no result three nights out of three: so we had heroes. And "we" is wrong, for I knew none by name among that hazy company unless I brought her with me. This was loneliness with noise, unlike the kind I had at home with no clock running down, and mirrors.