AGNI 85
Contents
Editor's Note
“What Next?”
Fiction
Soldier
If the City Falls
The Kiss
A Letter of Complaint to Pushkin
A Lapse of Memory
A Few Days Off
Parable in Ten Lessons
An Angel on Stilts
Essays
The Author as Translator
By Joel Agee
Confession 7
By Nin Andrews
The Lindbergh Baby and I
By Nin Andrews
Spider Season
By Megan Harlan
In the Ring
Walk with Snowy Things
By Lia Purpura
We Were Here
By Joe Walpole
Poetry
The Feast
Choke
God
By Kaveh Akbar
The Study of Butterflies
By David Barber
Before You Know It
An Afternoon with Doña Amelia
A Poem Called Baroque
The Quantum Mechanics of Everyday Life
By Philip Fried
After Reading Jim Harrison’s “After Reading Takahashi”
Here at Summer’s End
By Sydney Lea
Bat (in Autumn)
Bat (in Winter)
Concussion Sequel
Elegy for My Brother in the Wilderness
By Matt Morton
From the Lost Letters to Matias Perez, Aeronaut
By Andres Rojas
Blücher, Arendt, a Wildland Fire
By Andres Rojas
Elegy: Letter to My Wife’s Grandfather
MARTHA CARRIER HANGED AUGUST 19, 1692
By Cindy Veach
Dear Francis Cabot Lowell
By Cindy Veach
Jetty
By Noah Warren
At 3 a.m. the Night I Heard You Died
Parthenon Marbles
Art Feature
The Failure of Quick Paint (essay)
The Abiku Phenomenon
The world as construed, re-construed, and mis-construed. The fantastical meldings of the real and conjectural in the work of artist Olalekan Jeyifous are a vivid visual emblem for the assembled contents of the issue. Our writers, too, run “tests,” trying variations of the past and reassessing what had been thought obvious. More than once the reader has to ask, Did that just happen? The issue includes stories by Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Evanthia Bromiley, and Marjorie Sandor; essays by Joel Agee, Megan Harlan, and Brandon Kreitler; and poems by Kaveh Akbar, Rosalie Moffett, Noah Warren, and Kathleen Winter. The search for viable new versions of our “sensual” and “consensual” reality proceeds.