Issue 108 / Fall 2010
TRANSFORMATION Jennifer Anne Moses Blood into Butterflies James Doyle Making History Leslie Haynsworth The Other Girls J. Matthew Boyleston Viewed from the Keel of a Canoe Sarah Gordon A Call to Prophecy Blanche Farley Melanoma Ted Sanders Assembly Fred Yannantuono Aardvark Tasha Cotter Funny, Father Was Graceful Ian Miller Living Light Georges-Oliver Chateaureynaud The Bronze Schoolboy Paul Freidinger The Artist Concentrates the Details of Nothingness Rion Amilcar Scott Party Animal: The Strange and Savage Case of a Once Erudite and Eloquent Young Man Patty Hanahoe-Dosch Fleeing Back Stephen Massimilla Annunciation, Tortuguero (Costa Rica) Grace Frisone Road Home, A Memoir James Valvis Transformation
STORIES Gary Gildner If I Could Be With You Robert Schirmer The Woman Across the Table Mark Crimmins Slimmer Kim Hedden The Green Dress Daniel Meltzer Heads You Lose Janset Berkok Shami Tangled Dreams R. M. Kinder A Fragile Life Alice Denham La Casa de Serena Dennis McFadden Chickens’ Revenge
POEMS Jim Daniels The Police Academy Recruits Run Laps Around the Slo-Pitch Softball Fields Teaching the Spider to Fly Robert Parham A Colleague Returns from a Long Stay in Japan Annie Boutelle Caravaggio Views Giorgione’s Laura [take one] Brian C. Billings Guilt Is for the Man Who Kills a Peacock Chuck Tripi Poem at Sixty-One Kathleen Kirk Sonatina for Harmonica and Train Pretending to Be Bad Stephanie Mendel The Town of Lionel Steve Myers The Jews of South Africa
ESSAYS AND MEMOIRS E. S. Fletcher The Universe of Eye Lia Mastropolo Locating the Fault Line
From the editor’s desk
Editor’s Remarks
One might say that the special theme of this issue of Confrontation is over-determined.
Whether we are aware of it or not, we live in a timeof transformation, as distinct from simple, more or less incremental change, a staple of most historical periods and thus much more palatable to human taste. I am thinking, first and foremost, of global climate change—dismissed by many in the United States, intellectually acknowledged by many Europeans, and off the radar screen in still other nations. We have been warned about and are beginning to see its fearful, projected consequences: crop failures, inundation of island nations and low-lying coastal cities world-wide (where hu- man beings for thousands of years have chosen to build settlements), spreading deserts in Africa and China, migrating populations of disease-spreading insects, migrating populations of desperate, poverty- stricken people to richer nations, and the wholesale destruction of species further down on the food chain.
This, it seems to me, is the greatest challenge our species has ever faced—if indeed we come to face it…
Editor-in-Chief
