Volume 46 Issue 4

AFTER ENOUGH COMPOSTING, it is difficult to tell a melon from a slice of bread, or bean tips from aspidistra. So it is with time. 1974 is now sufficiently decomposed that is has co alesced with 1973 and 1975, and the six or so years surrounding, leaving an undifferentiated temporal muck. Nevertheless, I know that it was sometime in the general distillates of the mid-1970s when I first met Christin Couture—at a house on a crossroads, adjacent to a field where a nubile farmers daughter rode inces santly on a big tractor. Christin was often drawing in the living room. I didn’t pay much attention—we hippies were always drawing, noodling on Pan’s-pipes, braiding things, scribbling in notebooks. Then one day I looked.

Faye Wolfe was another who looked at about that time, and her story in the Valley Advocate was the first critical notice Christin ever received. In this issue we reunite painter and reviewer in a special art insert, where you can taste that elixir of joy and deep misgiving that only Christin mixes.

David Lenson
for the editors

Table of Contents

Introduction

Sick Play, Fiction by Elizabeth Searle

Birds in the Woods, Poetry by Brian Swann,
Winner of the 2006 Anne Halley Poetry Prize

Not Well and Not Sick of the Chickahominy Fever:
Hollis Wrisley’s Civil War,
Non-Fiction by Richard H. Brown

Noisy Bird, Poetry by Lesle Lewis

Tinderbox, Fiction by Robert Wexelblatt

The Godchild and the Doll,
Non-Fiction by Nance Van Winckel

Paintings by ‘Christin Couture’, Art by Christin Couture
color insert of artwork with commentary by Faye Wolfe

Wild Blue Yonder, Poetry by Barbara Ras

Shame, Fiction by Lori O’Dea

Dear Farrah, Poetry by Farrah Field

Toxoplasmosis; Or the Beginning of Things You
Can’t Take Back, Fiction by Michael A. FitzGerald

Bony Mares, Poetry by James Doyle

Anniversary, Non-Fiction by John Hicks

Ghost Hymn, Poetry by G.C. Waldrep

The Manifesto of the Short Man,
Non-Fiction by Sameer Yerawadekar

Fourteener 279,
Poetry by Douglas Woody Woodsum

For Good, Poetry by Tara Bray

Orifice in the Undieworld, Non-Fiction by John Allen

Seated Baby with Whip, Art by Christin Couture

Contributors