Excerpts
Dirt Angels, by Donald Platt
Plato’s late dialogue Parmenides recounts the tale of the elder scholar questioning young Socrates about his early philosophical ideas. Can only the just, beautiful, and good be the stuff of ideas, Parmenides asks, or do abstractions apply also to the vile and paltry such as hair, mud, and dirt? Socrates responded that surely ideas do …
Punishment
She told the police she couldn’t remember anything. From out of the pain and the dim apprehension that she was alive, she shook her head no. Even after she’d been stabilized and the swelling had gone down so that she could see—though her vision was blurred and the iv drip made her mind hover just …
Sardis
Easter Sunday and it’s windy and cold for April in the Deep South. To make matters worse, squall lines have been blowing up from the Gulf all morning, hanging tattered clouds so low and thick they look like the soaked inside of a cotton bale. I’m on a three-day book tour—Memphis, Jackson, and Oxford, Mississippi—for …
Alphabet
“Tomás,” my mother used to tell me, “Tu tienes que hablar por mi.” So I would go with her down to the welfare or some other place, the post office, the bank, the school, and I would be her voice. I could always talk real good, and come to think of it, I could conversate …
From the Interim Senior Editor
This issue marks a moment of transition in the print life of Prairie Schooner. For more than twenty years, Hilda Raz served as Prairie Schooner‘s editor in chief, guiding this journal through times that were sometimes challenging but always exciting and rewarding for all who were associated with it during those years. Hilda’s impact here …
Open Between Us, by George Looney
If you google George Looney, you’ll be asked if you meant to google George Clooney. I would love to hear George the Actor read poems from George the Poet’s latest collection, Open Between Us. Pre Up in the Air, Clooney wouldn’t have possessed the maturity of tone to carry off this duty. Now he’s ready. …
The Bird Lady
That morning of the owl, I remember taking my time walking home from my grandmother’s hogan. I didn’t want to go home to my dad, is why. He was laid off from the oil fields again. Next to the phone he kept a list. He’d written “Fucking Drilling Companies” across the top of it, most …
Jack
The first time I picked up Jack* for his counseling session, he stomped out of his classroom with his arms swinging, his hands in two tight fists. As he walked down the hall ahead of me, his legs bowed out as if he’d just jumped down from his horse. But this was Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. And …
Home Brew
It suddenly seemed like every man in Daisy’s acquaintance was brewing his own beer. At parties thrown by her girlfriends, husbands served the stuff up in jam jars and made a show of raising their full glasses to observe the filter of the light. Daisy almost never drank the stuff. She hated the smell. Home …