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Robert Schultz

Robert Schultz has received an NEA fiction award and VQR’s Balch Prize for Poetry. We Were Pirates: A Torpedoman’s View of the Pacific War comes out this spring from Naval Institute Press. He teaches at Roanoke College.

Author

Binh Danh, <i>The Botany of Tuol Seng #14</i>. Photographic negative on leaf.

Faces Fleshed in Green

Winter 2009 | Poetry

While visiting the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, a former Khmer Rouge prison camp in Cambodia’s capital city of Phnom Penh, Binh Danh studied closely the mug shots of former prisoners. Danh, a Vietnamese-born artist whose family fled to a refugee c [...]

The Most Beautiful Day of the Year

David was talking, slowly and with concentration, choosing his words carefully, sometimes haltingly, as he did when he was trying to get something right. I couldn't remember how we had gotten onto the subject of Spain. Mary had told a story about a [...]

Marriage Fires

Where on the spectrum of living fire Do a man and woman walk this morning Through woods above a shallow river Late in March? In winter they dozed And smoldered coolly, or flared inside Like ice on skin, a flame that numbs. The grass lay matted and bl [...]

Sight & Distance

Afternoon like a crystal box: pine trees,          citizens, rising clouds          in shining cases. Finches dart through walnut branches,          through scissoring light, specimens perfect, air like glass. But I'm all e [...]

Gary Snyder and the Curve of Return

Gary Snyder was born in San Francisco in 1930. He grew up in Washington state and in Portland, hiking the woods and sometimes logging in them. After a brief early marriage, the Reed graduate interspersed work on a trail crew in Yosemite with study [...]

The Moths

Asleep in our lives, we wandered out With trowel, lantern, and yellow dishpan, Digging ferns in the hilly woods. We imagined only a corner garden Shaded in pines, as spring in the trees Tipped quickly toward summer, Afternoon sliding hard toward dusk [...]

Antarctica

1 As we step toward the perfect Antarctic, Green at first, but deliberate in our hatred, Which keeps us marching, we are struck After every kill by the spots of red On the snow, by the splash on porcelain. Red, which seems so impossible, wrapped In t [...]