The Tangent Reading Series

If there were Today everything looks like a squirrel. The marble angels in the cemetery, the pigeons on the light post, the leaves hanging on the edges of their tippling stems. Everything is all squirrel-nosed and craggy knuckled for today, and the fur rough and weatherproof on the edges of the car lot, on the edges of the wrought iron gate and all around the edges of tomorrow’s leftovers in their to-go carton of plastic and tinfoil. And when every dollar store on the block offers a bushy-tailed gazebo planter, there’s no such planter in case of a drought in case of a flood. Tomorrow is the day we’ll talk squiddily to the squirrels and what’s squiddily is squirrely in the ocean a squirrel in the ocean a whirring squid in the ocean force gale. The ocean force gale in the pocket of dire prediction. --Jen Coleman	JEN COLEMAN is a Minnesota poet by way of DC, New York and now Portland. Former co-editor of the literary magazine Pom2 and co-curator of the DC based “In Your Ear” reading series. Jen also has a chapbook, Propinquity, and her work has appeared in The Tangent, Ixnay, Chain and other awesome journals. View a video of Jen Coleman's poetry here.
DAY POEM and can anyone tell what is wrong well then let's be really American and smash things up --Mel Nichols	MEL NICHOLS is the author of Bicycle Day (Slack Buddha Press 2008), The Beginning of Beauty, Part 1: hottest new ringtones mnichol6 (Edge Books 2007), Day Poems (Edge Books 2005), and just out from Edge Books, Catalytic Exteriorization Phenomenon (finalist in the National Poetry Series). With Mark Cunningham she recently collaborated on the online chapbook nightlightnight. She teaches at George Mason University.
WE ARE DUENDE FOR PIGS A fire danced around us. A pig ate at us. Much did we hate it was a us we knew. They treated sheep to us & lude oracles moosey moosey boom-on-it stuff. I'm gamble normally mammary lotioning not un-like a duende's gonna loose the auto-confirm Boston intellectual pitbull's torte clamp device, & comely. --Rod Smith	ROD SMITH'S most recent book is Deed (University of Iowa, 2007). He is also the author of Music or Honesty, The Good House, Poèmes de l’araignée (France), In Memory of My Theories, The Boy Poems, Protective Immediacy, and New Mannerist Tricycle with Lisa Jarnot and Bill Luoma. A CD, Fear the Sky, came out from Narrow House Recordings in 2005. He edits Aerial Magazine and publishes Edge Books. Smith is also editing, with Peter Baker and Kaplan Harris, The Selected Letters of Robert Creeley for the University of California Press.

The First Session. When I arrived in his office there was a little pot of coffee next to the table. I was told to take a seat on the chair to the right, bulky brown leather one across from him. I wondered if he would offer me a cup of coffee. He asked what could he do for me? I puttered and ended up back in a familiar dissociated place, I was feeling disconnected from myself. And I confessed, I had nothing prepared, I did not know why I was there, but there was something about my current analysis that I should probably speak about. Predictably, my use of the word “should” was analyzed, but yet there was still an obvious opening in which I could go forward. My current analysis was “dead,” it was at an impasse, but an impasse that my analyst would not agree to. I pointed to myself in all the predictable ways, I was feeling dependent around my dissertation, psychically bound by my chair and reader, “organized” by them, beforehand, I was merely hysterically writing and so on. As I began speaking I felt immediately unimpressive, if not spacey—he asked if I was tired—I sat like an androgynous figure fumbling with a pair of reading glasses. I imagined he had some thoughts about my subdued gender, my demure way of sitting in the chair. I described that my sexuality had gone through shifts I wanted to understand. [Text omitted]. He asked me who bought me the ring I was wearing. “I did.” “How long ago?” “About six months.” In the uninspiring way I was going, revealed that I shopped when I was bored. He said, “it seems like a good thing to do.” —Cynthia Sailers	Cynthia Sailers is the author of the poetry collections Lake Systems (Tougher Disguises, 2004) and Rose Lungs (Atticus/Finch, 2004). She is writing a dissertation on perversion and group psychology. She is currently in private practice as a therapist in San Francisco as well as working at a publicly funded clinic at the Mission where she leads a process group for women. She serves on the board for Small Press Traffic. And is expecting a second book, Ladies of Leisure, in June from Cy Press.
I am heir to the Max Factor fortune sometimes the silver balloons of Warhol's Factory fill up my mind until family & friends are obscured beyond them, penitentiary glamour. A giant cigarette hovers over the head of Michael Phelps In the future this will mean hospital, vineyard refugee camp. A tender way of feeling for the door in the dark not a grope but the absence of predation that has made the local fauna Utopian, no in-wrought fear of being eaten. That’s how I feel when I see the last resort, & beyond it, the ocean, family & friends, the silver balloons in a cluster let go toward Oahu the door opens up like a flood of endorphins I want to tip over my head to the side & pour them all out through my ear so later I can feel the same river twice, the carnage embellished by silver balloons. It's like there's euphemism, then the world, & you can't know it. It wins. It conveys a gold medal. It's triumphalist glow is the meaning of the sun. —Dana Ward	Dana Ward is the author of a couple of books that just came out in 2009—Roseland (Editions Louis Wain) & the Drought (Open 24hrs). He lives in Cincinnati, edits Cy Press, & works as an advocate for adult literacy at the Over-the-Rhine Learning Center.
view a film from Picture Palace by Stephanie Young	Stephanie Young lives and works in Oakland. Her books of poetry are Picture Palace (in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni, 2008) and Telling the Future Off (Tougher Disguises, 2005). She edited Bay Poetics (Faux Press, 2006) and her most recent editorial project is Deep Oakland (www.deepoakland.org).

BRANDON BROWN is from Kansas City, Missouri. His friends have published his poetry in chapbook form including Memoirs Of My Nervous Illness (Cy Press), 908 1078 (Transmission Press), Kidnapped (Duration Press), Camels! (TAXT), and the forthcoming Wondrous Things I Have Seen (Mitzvah Chaps). He co-curates The (New) Reading Series at 21 Grand in Oakland and lives in San Francisco. Visit Brandon at HI: brandonbrown.blogspot.com.

TOM FISHER is working on two manuscripts: one on not writing and modernism; one on songs, selves and sorceries. He lives in Portland, OR and teaches at Portland State University.

ALLI WARREN was born in the 1980s and remains extant. Recent publications include No Can Do (Duration Press), and a collaboration with Michael Nicoloff entitled Bruised Dick. Alli co-curates The (New) Reading Series at 21 Grand, and lives in San Francisco's Mission District. Visit her blog, Organ Pleasure, at theingredient.blogspot.com.

from Green-Wood

LITTLE WONDER leaf blower HI DADDY
in black marker on a pumpkin partly
eaten near no grave tucked today
among the Astroturf the flag
draped coffin of a soldier bowed head
honor guard beside the road bus horn
blast from Jackie Gleason depot I skirt
the mourning circle almost stumble
on a soldier up in trees waiting
with his trumpet to play taps the sun
floods out from clouds hands lift to eyes
to noses warm I stand in changing
light muscles tensed like the intruder
that I am two white-gloved soldiers
work to tuck the folded flag ends in peaked
hats pressed together in the subway sings
a guy with few teeth in clear bell voice
I ain't gonna study war no more
but I am more and more

--Allison Cobb

Allison Cobb is the author of Born2 (Chax Press, 2004) a poetic meditation on her hometown of Los Alamos, New Mexico. She is currently at work on Green-Wood, a long piece about the 500-acre Victorian cemetery across the street from her home in Brooklyn, New York. She moved from Brooklyn to Portland, Oregon in January.

from tidelands

"toll"
the coastline so "its shape betrays
all" known maps – the tongue "flooded – augments"
into prayers "of entrance" and

inclose

["hanom"] ["hanom"] ["hanom"]

~
[hanom : water]

--Craig Santos Perez

Craig Santos Perez, a native Chamoru from the Pacific Island of Guahan (Guam), is a co-founder of Achiote Press and author of from unincorporated territory [hacha] (Tinfish Press, 2008). His poetry, essays, reviews, and translations have appeared in New American Writing, Pleiades, The Denver Quarterly, The Colorado Review, and ZYZZYVA, among others.

Horny? Depressed? American?

Free Vietmanese girl! You win! Free! It's about
Having the freedom to manifest, the opportunity
For uncensored cancer and accomplish blah blah!
Yes, even your sad, corn-holed ass can liberatize
Her third-world bottom. Send $20,000 money order
For a personalized smack. You want suck? Me too.
(Paypal OK.) Hey, who was first president? Who?!
(Amiri Baraka.) Joe Boosh freed negroes in the Iraq,
Gave them raisons d’être and chump change careers,
Blowing your fuckin’ nuts off. Immigrants are like that…
From grass hut to FEMA trailer park? From hymning
Slave to 50% polyester, 50% cotton slut for life? From
Stone-washed jeans with tacks and frills to ROTC, OK?

--Linh Dinh

Linh Dinh is the author of two collections of stories, Fake House (2000) and Blood and Soap (2004), four books of poems, All Around What Empties Out (2003), American Tatts (2005), Borderless Bodies (2006) and Jam Alerts (2007), with a novel, Love Like Hate, scheduled to be released in 2009 by Seven Stories Press. His work has been anthologized in Best American Poetry 2000, 2004, 2007 and Great American Prose Poems from Poe to the Present, among other places. Linh Dinh is also the editor of the anthologies Night, Again: Contemporary Fiction from Vietnam (1996) and Three Vietnamese Poets (2001), and translator of Night, Fish and Charlie Parker, the poetry of Phan Nhien Hao (2006). Blood and Soap was chosen by the Village Voice as one of the best books of 2004. His poems and stories have been translated into Italian, Spanish, French, Dutch, German, Portuguese, Japanese, Arabic, Icelandic and Finnish, and he has been invited to read his works all over the US, London, Cambridge, Paris, Berlin and Reykjavik. . He has also published widely in Vietnamese.

Occitan Reverb

The leaf swings: I don't hold it
it's on to other subjects
once new, now pushed by low sighs
whose melodies are easy
I see them move in bitter air
though sweet in place and season
its leaves
that soon will prosper
the bad will be over
the sweet will enter my heart
It will be sweet there
In turn for each pain

--Rodney Koeneke

from "IN PORT"

Dear Ocean Beauty,

I need to rest my eyes from watching the need to rest my eyes when it
goes dark.

It is just as unsafe here as it is anywhere else.

The surface remains aesthetically uneven.

At this bend, its bent allows the world to fall open.

The space, this space must be maintained or desire ends on this
nothing to lose land.

And then sometimes I think you can't get real quiet anymore.

So, I bear against the water. Holding onto the edges of sounds,
letters, words,emotions, events in time, the selves.

A synth sound extends into a thin line that extends in a vertical
fashion.

You move it as you impress your eyelids. Keep the paddle against the
tide.

The breaks interrupt the time that passes.

A swamp of carcassed sea shells that represent the past.

It changes the data. (Just hold on.) Hold on there.

Albeit angelic but retired, to the everyday act of staring.

I rely on a astral sketchbook. To write these words against fashion
and consequence, I put a symbol in place of absent sound.

--Cat Tyc

Cat Tyc is a writer/video maker living in Portland. She is representing Oregon in The Anthology of Younger Poets that will be published by Outside Voices press in January. [writing]

When I started doing my dance the place went crazy and Mr. Pride came
running with the coach. I dropped the forks before they got to me,
the coach screaming like you hear him all the way down on their
practice field, "Son, do you know what my boys'd do if I was to let
them at you?"

I tried to jump over his head but slipped on a smushed Tater-Tot and
landed across his neck and the whole place went wilder. All I really
remember is flying chocolate milk.

In the principal's office I acted like I didn't know what was going
on until they went to figure out what to do with me and I crawled out
the window and we never talked about it again.

--Vincent Craig Wright

Vincent Craig Wright is the Fiction Writer at Southern Oregon University. He studied with James Dickey at the University of South Carolina, where he was the recipient of The South Carolina Academy of Authors Fiction Prize. Redemption Center, his debut collection of stories, was published by Bear Star Press in 2006. He lives in Ashland, OR. [writing]

from Truancy

search and research finally
under the library heading “problem children”
the frame of what is offered, expected
problemkinder, cross culturally rotted
Jon was a boy who had magic

Jon was a boy who had magic
was the beginning of his story
the one he was writing
the one constructed of hope
a fine line drawing
the first line
of course life will be what you make it
of course, meritocracy
and the good clarity of addition and subtraction
a correct answer filling in for wonder
a battery of psychological inquiries

—Sarah Anne Cox

Sarah Anne Cox is the author of Parcel (O Books 2006) and Arrival (Krupsaya 2002). She lives in San Francisco where she teaches, windsurfs and cares for her two children. When not on the road, she is thinking about leaving and writing her new manuscript entitled Truancy.

Lullaby

hey look
i am my country’s
daughter
with an ego-tied heart
hard-wired damage
fault line of anger
no one will treat me bad

scattered suggestible
i apologize in advance

i have carved obscenities into my own table
savoring berries big as bullets
spit seeds through vertical holes
at the power lines
then helped build

so come here child
let me hold you
a remove
will wrap around us each
and warn

--Dana Teen Lomax

Dana Teen Lomax is the author of Curren¢y (Palm Press), Room (a+bend press), and the co-editor of Letters To Poets, Conversations About Poetics, Politics and Community (Saturnalia Books, 2008). Her work has received the San Francisco Foundation's Joseph Henry Jackson prize for poetry, as well as Academy of American Poets, Ann Fields, and Leo Litwak awards. Supported by the California Arts Council, the Peninsula Community Foundation, the Zellerbach Family Fund, the Marin Arts Council, and other organizations, she is presently working on Q, "home movies" about raising a daughter on prison grounds. She lives in northern California with her family.

lemon pudding cake
with blueberry glaze

(from THE VEGAN POEMS)

the imparted blue
color burst half
into quarters soy
i evened it out

raising a toothpick
now and again
as if
bubbles had formed

if bubbles have formed
lift it off to
unmold the rim once
connected at the tip

what partially set
to adhere to
some lazy man’s way
to make a fancy cake

but pair it
with flakes then
watch as the world
goes agar like

an ancient turmeric wizard
emulsifying the testers
their eyes glazed over
once bubbles have formed

if bubbles have formed
remember to lift it
off to unmold the
elaborate

kiwis
strawberries
raspberries
once connected at the tip

but speed the setting
and it’s back
this lazy man’s way
to make a fancy cake

soy i unevened it out
quarters back into halves
the departed blue
color intact

—Jesse Morse

Jesse Morse lives and writes out of Portland, Oregon. His work, interviews and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in American Drivel Review, One Less: Art on the Range, Jacket, Hobart, P.F.S. Post, Crane's Bill Books, Mirage #4/Period(ical), and CAB/NET Magazine. He edited Bombay Gin 30 and worked as an Associate Editor at Portland-based magazine Ellipsis for a year. He appeared on Portland KBOO's poetry show "The Talking Earth" and even had his own radio show once.

Madison

and i tightened my seat belt

the descent

came /

my neighbor asked me

if i minded holding

her hand

as her husband had died.

she always took his hand.

as we descended.

take my hand

with old heat /

Christmas as usual

falls in love

—Jim Dine

Jim Dine was born in 1935. He has been a painter, sculptor, and poet all his life. This is his second reading in 40 years.

Arles Mars

for Lyn Hejinian

I thought I could write a poem today

He had beautiful eyes

How could he see that dreary European light and make it beautiful?

Thought: I could right a poem: Today

I recognize the matte

Waves composed of discrete lines

My name curled so delicately in each corner

—Vincent Katz

Vincent Katz is a poet, translator, and critic. He is the author of nine books of poetry, including Cabal of Zealots, Pearl (with artist Tabboo!), Understanding Objects, and Rapid Departures (with artist Mario Cafiero). His latest book, Judge (2007, Charta/Libellum) is a collaboration with artist Wayne Gonzales that takes its words entirely from The New York Times. Katz has published essays or articles on the work of Jennifer Bartlett, Francesco Clemente, Jim Dine, Robert Rauschenberg, Kiki Smith, Philip Taaffe, and Cy Twombly. He won ALTA's 2005 National Translation Award for his book of translations from Latin, The Complete Elegies of Sextus Propertius (Princeton University Press). He is the editor of the poetry and arts journal VANITAS and of Libellum books.

We’ll start at the beginning with Genesis, and we’ll read the Bible book by book, no use missing any stories. She liked the beginning about the earth being dark and God creating light, but she didn’t think much about Adam and Eve and the snake. She was full of talk about Cain and Abel, and the part about men begetting and hte evil that followed. Sometimes she skipped passages. If we read every word, we’ll never get to Jesus, she said. Other times she read the same passage over and over again. She loved the sentence, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth. Each time she read it, she hid her face with her hands and said, I’m sorry Lord. I asked her if everything she read were true and She said, If the Lord says it’s so, it’s so.

—Diana Michener

Diana Michener was born in Boston in 1940. She has had many exhibitions of her photographs in the U.S. and Europe. In 2001, she was given a retrospective at the Maison Européene de la Photographie in Paris. A book of her photographs and writing, DOGS, FIRES, ME, was published by Steidl Verlag in 2005. [writing]

Snowglobe

Glitter of snowcrystals beneath a streetlight, me, Janis, her sister Sharon who’s still in high school and her boyfriend John. On each exhale white puffs billow from our mouths, red noses and cheeks, ear muffs, overlong crocheted scarves, double stitched the way grandma taught me. John’s long, tense body struggles over the three-foot embankment of snow left from the plowers. He needs cigarettes. Badly. There’s been flurries on and off throughout the night, the road is solid white, one or two tire marks, when John reaches the street, he slips and grabs on to his boat of a car. “God damnit,” he yells, “how am I supposed to drive on this fucking ice.” John’s a hothead. I say and then Sharon says, “John, why didn’t you get cigarettes before we dropped the acid.” We whisper the acid part because we’re home for winter break and we don’t want any of the neighbors or the police or my mother to know we’re on drugs. “I don’t know, I don’t know,” he’s shouting, slipping in circles. Next we’re in the car, and the windshield is totally opaque, and pulsing with these gorgeous white crystalline flowers, and slowly the Chevy is moving and slipping across the road, and it’s so beautiful, the ice flowers and the white puffs from our mouths, when Janis announces, “We can’t see out the windshield, how can John be driving when we can’t see out the windshield.” And John screams, “I can do this, I can do this.” But then John’s screaming, “I can’t do this, I can’t do this.” We’re all so close together inside the car, I could lift my arm and touch anyone.

—Dodie Bellamy

Dodie Bellamy's essays and reviews have appeared in The Village Voice, The San Francisco Chronicle, Bookforum, Out/Look and The San Diego Reader as well as numerous literary journals and web sites. In January, 2006, she curated an installation of Kathy Acker's clothing for White Columns, New York's oldest alternative art space. With Kevin Killian, she has edited over 130 issues of the literary/art zine Mirage #4/Period(ical). Her latest collection, Academonia, was published by Krupskaya in 2006. Other books include Pink Steam and The Letters of Mina Harker. Her book Cunt-Ups won the 2002 Firecracker Alternative Book Award for poetry.

When I leave, you fall underneath

you    the underneath reflects your own 13    luck is not a replacement    love does not replicate itself or clone you    neither a complex sentence is not an idea    nor the number

in a name    the habit of luck is acquired    the number of a name    the habit of luck is required    a rabbit not a hare    reflectors mirror light    a woman’s wings refract love    a number not a hare reflects the time in a wing    a replacement not a hare refracts light over the reflectors    a number alights on women who have wings     not a hare nor a rabbit on a wing    your clone replaces your

time reflects light not your own    ideas refract wings and their luck    neither a woman nor a hare    you leave    I replicate neither love nor its replacement    underneath a number or a name

                — Gale Czerski

Gale Czerski's work has appeared in recent issues of Bird Dog and Mirage #4 Period[ical]. Her poem Ambulatory Siren Songs has been published in pamphlet form by Nine Muses Books. The chapbook, Invocation, is being published by FLASH+CARD. She is currently preparing a manuscript for Dusie Press's Wee Books series.

from “This Window Makes Me Feel”

This window makes me feel like I’m protected. This window makes me feel like people don’t know much about recent history, at least as far as trivia goes. This window makes me feel whole and emotionally satisfied. This window makes me feel like I’m flying all over the place, gliding and swirling down suddenly. This window makes me feel like I count and I enjoy knowing my opinions are heard so that hopefully I can help change the future. This window makes me feel like I’ll find the one thing that makes me feel like I want to feel. This window makes me feel like I can tackle any problem anytime. This window makes me feel like I have energy again and it refreshes my brain cells and makes my feet move. This window makes me feel like I’m the only person who can do something as cool as drumming. This window makes me feel like it’s better to hear that other people have gone through it—it’s like a rainbow at the end of the storm. This window makes me feel good and grounded and peaceful all at the same time. This window makes me feel like the year I spent campaigning was worth it.

— Robert Fitterman

Flanked between Shell and Mobil gas stations, Robert Fitterman grew up in a pre-sprawl St. Louis suburb named Creve Coeur (broken heart). He is the author of 9 books of poetry; 3 of those books constitute his ongoing poem Metropolis. Metropolis 1-15 was awarded the Sun & Moon New American Poetry Award (1997), and Metropolis 16-29 (Coach House Books, 2002) received the Small Press Traffic Book of the Year Award in 2003. Several of his other books are collaborations with visual artists, including most recently War, the musical (Subpress, 2006) with Dirk Rowntree. From 1986-1996, he co- curator of the Segue Reading Series, and from 1991-2002 he was editor-publisher of the literary journal Object. Fitterman has been on the writing faculty at New York University since 1989 in both the General Studies Program and the Department of English, and also the writing faculty at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, Bard College. He lives in New York City with his wife, poet Kim Rosenfield and their wondrous daughter Coco.

(from Act Two of The Gertrude Spicer Story)

A Flower

For Jen Dunlap

Out of change comes touch and out of skin comes merely buttercups, out of a sign comes death, out of death comes a longer summer. So then the season is that remembering a way of touching a back is buttercups suggesting a dandelion and it is waiting, it is not, it is so impossible to be winning and touch a poor summer strangely, it is so important to have a season not to touch but to touch again.

Jared Hayes

Jared Hayes is working and living in Portland, Oregon. His poetry or his vis/po has appeared in or is forthcoming from Bombay Gin, Dusie, Five Fingers Review, Hot Whiskey, and Small Town. He participated in the 2oo6 dusie Kollectiv projekt with the chapbook homage to Ted Berrigan titled RecollecTed. He is the co-author, with Joseph Cooper, of Insuring the Wicker Man Shadow Created Delusion, Hot Whiskey Press, 2005.

Poetry by Rob Halpern:

D I S A S T E R L Y R I C

•

Domestic oil turns disaster into peace
Making opportunities — new settlements,
Money, which is what I thought I had

Dreamt you thinking. Out loud, we were leaden
As the sun. We were out harvesting wind
— selling smog and low population land.

But now I only want you to hold me
If only you could hold a mirror to my fat
— fertile slopes, these bodies at rest —

not knowing what this flesh can do.

Rob Halpern is the author of Rumored Place (Krupskaya 2004) and (Vigilance Society 2006). Currently, he’s co-editing the poems of the late Frances Jaffer together with Kathleen Fraser, writing a collaborative poem with Taylor Brady, and translating the early essays of Georges Perec, the first of which is forthcoming in Disaster SuiteChicago Review. He lives in San Francisco.

Prose by Matthew Stadler
(from a long narrative work in progress):

Suddenly you were nearly there. A crop of trees, stacked lumber, new houses, leveled earth where houses would be, the ground erupting with cables, and off the broad-shouldered exit that oft-recurring drive-through, freed of specificity but with its excellent mayonnaise, had grown in this germless environment serving superbly refined, they called them "sandwiches," but the bread, fresh and warm, was not exactly bread, and inside there was a complete meal that seemed to have come from everywhere — chick peas from the Levant, Chinese hoisin, saucison, jicima, a smear of beans, crema or not, and some kind of meat like a chicken but without any complications — so perfect you craved it as often as it came, seemingly at every exit, with a smoothie made of that day's fruit, or every fruit, or some new single fruit that magically combined the virtues and tastes of all others, plus bran, which settled your stomach and kept things moving. This thing, this "sandwich," that was the pure product of travel — its bread a perfect hybrid of pita and tortilla, baguette, pistolet, Wonder bread — was the opposite of nowhere. It was here, now, exactly in your hands, suddenly, the very moment you thought of it, and no theory of displacement or simulation could tell you this meal was not perfect, or this moment wrong in any way, and you longed for it and loved it, savored it, until it was gone. And then along it came, again.

There was hunger and satisfaction, but are they enough to give shape and heft to a life? What of all the other feelings — pride, ambition, hope, resentment, wonder, futility — too hard to hold on to around a highway bend so slight your sigh of forgetting is enough to navigate the turn, the past curling away behind you, closer than it appeared? And what new exit is this? What great new sandwich around this bend in the road? Wow, great! If thoughts, like meals, can repeat themselves without ever being the same, who would be so dull as to forsake the fresh pleasures of this old thought, suddenly changed? And who does not get hungry again, for the very same sandwich, mile after mile?

Matthew Stadler is the author of four novels, including Landscape: Memory and Allan Stein. He was the literary editor of Nest Magazine and is the co-founder and editor of Clear Cut Press. His non-fiction has been published widely in North America and Europe, and he is currently researching the early history of North Pacific America, for a series of lectures and essays.

t h e t a n g e n t r e a d i n g s e r i e s