A man was sad—for himself, maybe for someone else, maybe he had lost something, or someone—so he hired some workmen to erect a monument. He was not surprised when they came calling early one morning, while he was still in bed, but he was surprised when, with a practiced slash, the foreman opened his chest. “We build the monument inside,” the foreman said. “But who will see the monument?” the man protested. “It’s a monument for feeling, not for seeing,” the foreman replied.
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fiction by Julia Gibson
It was the third dry year. There had been a stream once, made of snowmelt from the mountains to the north, but even the snow had been sparse the winter our coyote mother met our dad, a dog who had his own concerns. When he stopped showing up, it wasn’t because he didn’t want to, Mam said. His obligations conflicted.
That spring it only rained a time or two, and the sage covering the hills went brittle as Mam swelled with more of us than she could sustain. When the stream became a mudpath, she dug down to the damp. After a time, though, she could dig no deeper. So, coyote to the bone, she did without.
Little water made little milk. At first there were five of us wailing mewlers, but if too many latched on, the milk ran out before anyone was satisfied. Then we all were crying, and Mam worried we’d be found by somebody bent on bringing coyote numbers down to none. One after another, three pups departed for the Beyond, and then it was only Luz and me, and there was barely enough.
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Michigan Quarterly Review is pleased to announce that it has awarded this year’s trio of literary prizes to the authors of an amusing—and poignant—story about strangers in the strange land of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, an elegant poem on perspectives during a balloon flight, and a gritty poem listing the detritus of life at a Detroit high school.
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The children I write with die, no matter how much I love them, no matter how creative they are, no matter how many poems they have written, or how much they want to live. They die of diseases with unpronounceable names, of rhabdomyosarcoma or pilocytic astrocytoma, of cancers rarely heard of in the world at large, of cancers that are often cured once, but then turn up again somewhere else: in their lungs, their stomachs, their sinuses, their bones, their brains. While undergoing their own treatments, my students watch one friend after another lose legs, cough up blood, and enter a hospital room they never come out of again.
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