Copyright © 1997 David Breskin
ISBN 1-880834-31-6 (paper)
ISBN 1-880834-32-4 (cloth)

Library of Congress Catalog Number: 97-65397

First Edition

Published by the Cleveland State University Poetry Center
1983 East 24th Street, Cleveland, OH 44115-2440

Funded Through
Ohio Arts Council
________________________
727 East Main Street
Columbus, Ohio 43205-1796
(614) 466-2613

My thanks are given to the editors of the following publications, where these poems first appeared:

ACM: “Fresh Kills,” “Abort Retry Fail,” “Slash and Burn,” “Sendero Luminosa”

Alaska Quarterly Review: “A Small Boy, Your Son,” “Youths Adrift in a New Germany Turn to Neo-Nazis”

B City: “Blues for Fatman,” “The Unacceptable Lace of Capitalism”

Boatman’s Quarterly Review: “Dark Canyon: A Brief History of the River”

Boulevard: “Turkey Baster”

Columbia Poetry Review: “Semtex / PA 103,” “Documentary,” “Lost Aisle of Dogs (Shopping Safeway)”

Denver Quarterly: “Jet Lag: Sometimes It Comes to This”

DoubleTake: “Watching the Grass Grow”

Fourteen Hills: “Pulse Points,” “What the Shrink Told Us,” “The Big One”

Harvard Magazine: “The Town Crier”

New American Writing: “Shatter Glass / Kristallnacht,” “Smart Money,” “Politics: No Stones No Fish No Wind,” “Nothing on TV (Tonight),” “Da Hood,” “Throw It Down (With Authority)”

The New Yorker: “Free Tibet,” “Desk Work, After Hearing Bad News”

Nimrod: “The Winter Garden,” “Christmas Quartet,” “Valentine on 109th Street”

No Roses Review: “Chyna in the Land of Revolving Desserts”

The Paris Review: “Bugs,” “Poem for a Businessman (Me)”

Poetry East: “A Divorce”

Press: “A Few Words for Our Unborn Child”

Salmagundi: “Rain for Nineteen Hours”

SEE: “Sunday Roundup”

Southern Poetry Review: “The Factory”

TriQuarterly: “The Day I Take Her to the Hospital,” Evidence of Bear”

Western Humanities Review: “Chinese Airspace”

My gratitude as well to Fred Shafer for his careful reading of this work—encouragement, criticism, weakside help.