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February 1980

On The Run

Russia invades Afghanistan, and the United States, playing the outraged suitor, wags its hips at China. The problem of relationship is global and personal. What are the boundaries? Who do we kiss and who do we kill?

October 1979

The Open Door

Reasons, someone wrote, are whores. I believe that. The rational mind bends and scrapes like a sycophantic servant caught napping. I’m not against reason. I just don’t trust it if I’m out of the room.

August 1979

Three . . . And Three

After she left, he sat up all night watching his body for signs of change, then watching his mind, trying to arrange his thoughts like jewelry.

July 1979

Orbits

By the time you read this, Skylab may already have tumbled out of orbit and crashed back to Earth. I wish something else would tumble: the kind of mentality that put Skylab up there in the first place, with so little regard for the future.

June 1979

Words

There are no words / for who I am. I / build myself up, / I tear myself down.

March 1979

The Sun Also Changes

I’d always been interested in journalism, in writing and in self-expression. The magazine actually grew out of a conversation with Mike Mathers, who then ran the Community Bookstore. That’s when I was running the juice bar and I used to bring him juice drinks for lunch every day. Then one day we got to talking about how it would be nice if Chapel Hill had a newsletter or a magazine.

February 1979

Stories

The eyes she discovered by a lake in thirteenth century France. They had rolled down the hillside, gathering momentum until they saw their own reflection.

January 1979

Fathers

To let our parents be, to accept them as people, human and therefore imperfect, rather than as gods — that is the challenge.

December 1978

Thanksgiving

Anchors raised, we were a free people journeying into our own living flesh, and consciousness striving to know itself: political freedom; economic freedom; sexual freedom; artistic freedom. The freedom to abuse freedom. To enslave, and to set free. To become President, and to bear arms: to lean a rifle on a window sill, take aim, squeeze the trigger, and hurl a tiny speck of our own dark heart into the tissue of another. All for the sake of freedom — the greatest burden, the greatest joy.

Five Poems

I want to love loneliness / the way I love you. I want / to enter it and twist up its / hair in my fist.