Charles Rafferty
SALAMANDERS
Someday I’ll learn to pay attention to salamanders. Until then they must continue beneath their log, like a sport that no one follows. I have to believe there’s time. After all, the colonists eventually stopped sounding like the British. For my own part, I’ve begun writing “possum” instead of “opossum,” and just yesterday, I was able to remove an orange peel as a single fragrant husk.
CHARLES RAFFERTY co-directs the MFA program at Albertus Magnus College and teaches at the Westport Writers’ Workshop. His new collection of prose poems is A Cluster of Noisy Planets (BOA, 2021). His latest story collection is Somebody Who Knows Somebody (Gold Wake, 2021). His novel is Moscodelphia (Woodhall Press, 2021).
ISSUE TEN features poetry by David Baker, Leila Chatti, Adam Clay, Cynthia Cruz, Lightsey Darst, Melissa Ginsburg, Johannes Göransson, John Kinsella, Joanna Klink, Mark Levine, Cate Marvin, Sara Lupita Olivares, January Gill O’Neil, Robert Ostrom, Allan Peterson, Kevin Prufer, Dean Rader, Natasha Rao, Elizabeth Robinson, Martha Silano, Stella Wong, and Julia Wong Kcomt; fiction by Amber Caron, Sarah Rose Etter, and Lee Upton; nonfiction by Lesley Jenike and Arra Lynn Ross; a film essay by Mee Ok Icaro; Mary Ruefle in conversation with Mark Wunderlich; and a selection of erasures and collages by Mary Ruefle.