Issue 08. Fall 2017.Contents.![]() return to the table of contents, or click ![]() To download a .pdf file of the issue, click here. |
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butter on a dish, and in the closet
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biting flea |
carnations.
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thought that the young man was right. It was so goddamned beautiful you could almost forget. And he almost did. He almost went and spent his last breath without thinking on his daughters. But he caught himself and willed himself back to that scrabbly little farm. He came out the door of their clapboard house and saw the one singing and spinning herself around, the dust of the dirtyard lifting about her. The other sat on the porch steps, just below him. She moved her hands through the rising dust motes, moved her hands as though she was swimming through the dust, through the thick, slanted light. Both the girls barefoot, wearing sack dresses. The one with a splash of freckles across her nose and cheeks. The other dark-haired, like him.
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way of love that you lost was replaced, if you waited long enough, by another kind of love that didn’t even seem like love, it seemed more like courtesy, or exhaustion, or cooperation, but you later came to understand it as love or to call it love, at least—came to understand as you sit at a poetry reading, say, while your husband is reading a poem that you have heard him read one hundred times, a poem that seems to be about his mother and the hood scoop on his first car, and perhaps the hood scoop represented something about his mother, but the poet’s wife had long ago stopped bothering to tease these things out, because whenever she asked him a question about that—about what thing meant what, about what the one thing was supposed to be saying about another—he acted angry with her, with her failure to get to grips with this part of him that was the largest part of him, and she came to understand that her feelings about this didn’t matter to him anymore, the way that his feelings about her feelings about this didn’t matter to her anymore—she wanted him to write a poem about that, about the spent fuel of time, would it be so much for him to write that poem for her, something they could have together, a poem about how love binds you even when you stop wanting it to, a poem that would force her to understand?
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Shawn Vestal made his literary debut with Godforsaken Idaho, a story collection that won the 2014 PEN Robert W. Bingham Prize and was shortlisted for the Saroyan Prize. In 2017, he won the Washington State Book Award for his debut novel, Daredevils. A graduate of the Eastern Washington University MFA program, his stories have appeared in Tin House, McSweeney’s, and other journals. He writes a column for The Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Washington, where he lives with his wife and son.
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About Moss
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Connor Guy Alex Davis-Lawrence Manager of Outreach Amy Wilson |
Sharma Shields Michael Chin M. Allen Cunningham Elisabeth Sherman Diana Xin Dujie Tahat Ashley Toliver |