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Carl Phillips

The Steeper the Fall

from NER 39.1 (2018)

Like this, he said, and we watched him reach for yet another fistful
of straw and scatter it, filling those patches where the grass hadn’t grown
in enough. One half of me kept wanting to imagine him covering some 
shame by now unacknowledged because barely
 felt anymore, though 
understood, instinctively, as never too far away; the other half
kept still. Think of it like camouflage, he continued, People think camo, 
 they think it’s all about hunting. It ain’t. It’s about
 not being seen. Just
beyond him, ravens staring down the field in general for any stray
particulars seemed to wait for any of us to contradict him. No one did.
In the dream, it’s another time,
earlier in history, you can sleep outside
in the open country and wake as you fell asleep, untouched, nothing
missing, whatever sorrow or happiness as unchanged as the lake’s face
on a day without wind—
but this wasn’t that dream. You got something 
 to say about it, he said, looking vaguely toward all of us, then straight
at me. If there was to be any kind of tenderness here, this much
I could tell: it would have to start with tenderness. I mean the word itself.

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Cover art by Ralph Lazar

Volume 41, Number 4

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Writer’s Notebook

Writer’s Notebook—No Ruined Stone

Shara McCallum

Writer’s Notebook—No Ruined Stone

Answering such queries typically falls to novelists. But, being a poet, I felt compelled to ask poetry to respond.

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