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THIS PLACED

MATTHEW ROBERSON

He drives and drives past houses stretched like lights along the road. He passes fields filled with mud and cows. He passes stands of trees. He smells wood smoke and thinks he could go on like this, slipping out of one place into another. He can barely steer for the sun in his eyes.... MORE

ON THIS SPOT

MARK HAGE

Frost covered the land. The boulder was severed and sized. Rolled and polished by the expanding ice sheet, it was pushed across the plain. At the rim of the freeze, where the permafrost was in flux, the boulder gouged saturated soils. Embedded, with passive pressures against its sides, it resisted.... MORE

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Olea europaea: Young Woman With Eros On Her Shoulder

THERESA KISHKAN

        I’d treated myself to a cabin on the ferry from Brindisi to Piraeus. My journal tells me it cost about $30.00, which was expensive (this was 1976); but I’d come from Madrid by train across southern France and hadn’t slept for three days or nights. (One day I will tell the story of being alone in Madrid without luggage which had been lost enroute from Canada. It was my first trip, I was 21 years old, and I still don’t understand why I didn’t turn around and go home.) The train compartments had been full and the seats cramped. I’d doze off for a few minutes and then someone would inadvertently elbow me as he or she reached up for baggage or else rearranged clothing or rummaged in a basket for a leg of chicken or bottle of wine. I kept pinching myself to remind myself I was in Europe – that, and everything else kept me awake.

         The cabin was plain but comfortable and after leaving the party of Greeks I’d met on the train from Rome to Brindisi – a group of guys heading home from jobs in England to a family wedding in Athens – I crawled between clean sheets and slept. Waking, I stepped outside my cabin just as the ferry was passing through the canal cutting across the Isthmus of Corinth..... MORE

LOCKED OUT

EDWARD Mc WHINNEY

Simultaneous with the gentle snap shut of the lock, I knew that I had forgotten the keys. I pushed at the door the way people in films shout hello, hello, into a phone, knowing that the other person has hung up. I knew the keys were inside on a hook. I blamed the rockets of the Eve of St. John..... MORE