Price: $6.00 The House Within The House William Logan The pots had boiled dry again. Grandmother steadied herself against the stove. All day it rained, the aluminum lost its angry gleam, and the sharp woods stood becalmed, Ice Age boulders canted one against another, huddled as if for shelter. A pale horse nickered in the hay-damp garage, where Uncle trapped a tiny bat in a glass jar and suffocated it with a burning scrap of the Boston Herald. I watched it suffer, and galloped to play. The ransom note was scribbled down somewhere, Grandmother said, and set the pots boiling again, steam rising like filthy, transparent rags. I remembered my mother, in black lace like a bat; I remembered my father, muscled as the bay horse. Beneath the mossy boulders, I stood in the rain, trying to be the horse. Where were its parents? The telephone rang, but Grandmother refused to answer. The rain turned to snow, the snow to spring. Where had Uncle gone? Who had stolen baby sister? Kidnapped, mourned the book on the musty shelf. The telephone rang and rang, but no one answered. Johnny (1929 - 2000)     ^ back Frederick Buechner 1 He held the giraffe so long in his delicate hand he forgot the giraffe-shaped hole forgot where he was who he was if he knew like a President signing a bill into law he placed it at last upside down first then straight where it went the place it belonged tightening his lips in disdain like the only man in a room full of children his window gave out on the waterway windsurfing boys   girls all gold in bikinis a pelican perched on the dock if anyone opened the door his lament rose at the end to the shrill of Oedipus blinded a cow giving birth they lowered him into the pool in a harness hoisted him into a van in his chair drove him anywhere miles 2 a nurse said he grasped almost all that he heard said once in the dark he woke with his father?s name on his lips some line from a song sometimes he reached out his hand to whoever was there to strangers to touch them please he said please sometimes he turned his slow head with a smile that could break your heart break the pane in the window let in the water the sky the pelican robed like a prince like a shining prince like a   shining. Madness Is A Kind Of Poetry     ^ back David Starkey Nothing helped her. Not even daffodils and robins pecking at the rain-slick lawn like a kindergartner's vision of spring. Not the ornamental pear trees, their white blossoms vanishing into green just as the dogwoods exploded and the Carolina jasmine wrapped yellow-flowered vines around every mailbox and telephone pole. To her, spring was only pain. Inexorably, wisteria faded from brilliant violet to gray to white, the pink azalea petals scorched to brown and still my ex-wife sat by the open window without speaking. I'd touch her shoulder, but when she turned and put her hand on mine I could tell my face might as well be the sky, cobalt and cloudless and blank, and my fingers must feel as lifeless as a fistful of summer grass. The Help,     ^ back Maxine Kumin my mother called them in the thirties, the burnished stream that flowed into and around our lives, black all black, she wouldn't suffer whites to swab and sweep, Irish the worst. Thus Lottie came on Mondays, whose sharp-nosed iron opened darts, vanquished wrinkles, force-fed starch to the collars of my father's shirts; once married to, long since divorced from Fleet, who nevertheless deftly held aloft the silver salver of cheese puffs and chicken livers wrapped in bacon at cocktail parties the decibel level mounting as the gin and bourbon levels plummeted while Minnie, Bayou queen of the kitchen every Friday bringing forth cornmeal– breaded Crisco-deep-fried chicken swore that only Clabber Girl baking powder could elevate her double-decker chocolate cakes. Clifton, gay Clifton babied the lawn barbered the hedges, crooned into bloom the arbored roses, mounded black loam around the crowning lips of peonies his striped-red kerchief a distant bright bird wherever he stretched or squatted down and Hubert powered the Packard on a dozen daily errands with the elan his precious chauffeur's cap conveyed ferrying the laundress, gardener, cook and butler to and from the trolley stop as well as his most important charge Fraulein who lived in, exception to the rule, governing the offspring who called her Froy Fory wo bist du? in dual language school but had her days off visiting her brother taken prisoner in the First World War now risen to downtown citizen butcher. Such were the help of the helpless, Lord, my helpful father peeling bills from his folded over rubber-banded hoard paying under the table helping the help out of helplessness himself out of his life with the third and final heart attack his widow reduced to one black subsidized social securitied attendant and the infrequent flying visits of her scattered children.			Issue 7 - Excerpts The House Within The House William Logan Johnny (1929 - 2000) Frederick Buechner Madness Is A Kind Of Poetry David Starkey The Help, Maxine Kumin