Volume 13 Number 2

In the third or fourth year of River Teeth’s existence, a former undergraduate English professor of mine submitted an essay to us.  Read More...

You have to love this line from the Abbott Labs pamphlet on coronary artery disease, one of the parting gifts the charge nurse presents to you after you’ve had a heart attack: "The first symptom of heart disease is sudden death."

Country boys are tall—silo tall, not light-pole tall—with a stride like they have nowhere to be.

October 2003, Baghdad, Iraq. Major General Jon Gallinetti, U.S. Marine Corps, Chief of Staff of CJTF7, the operational command unit of coalition forces in Iraq, accompanied me on late-night clinical rounds in a combat surgical hospital.

In Baghdad, my administrative medical office is located at the Joint Task Force Headquarters in Saddam’s presidential palace within the Green Zone.

I’m all geared up to go after grouse with local Maine pal Dave.

When we walked out to cut the old shagbark, I almost stumbled when I saw the flower hanging like a yellow hand.

Name
Shagbark hickory
Juglandaceae Carya
symbol
CAOV2

My aunt Norma is standing in the bathroom of room 315 on the twenty-fifth floor of the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas, thinking that at this very moment the singer Tom Jones may be thirty feet above her.

And all over America we wave goodbye to our planets of origin and climb into buzzing spaceships, each with its own pulsating light, and land on the roof of the Very Large Planet Hotel, where we disembark, unfolding ourselves from individual largeness (for the planets we have come from are so small) and descend to the Bars, to the Book Fair, to the Important Room where one Large Poet reads largely, and the pale lights of our astronaut hearts beep their applause, a little sadly, remembering our Home Planet, how different we felt there, the air clearer, our footprints grander.

Listen and watch this essay!