A handsome new issue is out and here's a taste:

Sylvie is a freak, is six feet seven of high school Amazon, monkey toes, banana fingers, bushy blazing orange hair like a torch lighting smooth mocha skin. She has oversized knobby knees and elbows sharp as a screaming match. Coach wants her for basketball, for volleyball, for bedtime stories over Puerto Rican rum. No one else wants her for nothing.

She loves a boy like the Father and the Son. He is Tony Macaroni to the girls in their belly shirts and tight black jeans. They are cheerleader cute and they smoke in the girls' rooms blabbing like fools about Tony. Sylvie slumps to the house and cries on her bed over Tony, only Tony's maybe five foot ten, got pretty black curls with eyelashes look like a model on a magazine. A tank-top boy in a candy-apple Ford with a megawatt stereo, Tony plays his satin Stratocaster at the dirty-dancing parties Sylvie never gets to go to.

Aunt Pumpkin tells Sylvie, says Listen here, girl, you got a big old brain in that long tall body, you forget about all of that boyfriend juju. When y'all gone to college and you got a education, make a living on your own, then the men come running, hear? Sylvie thinking, Oh yeah, right, I want to waitress till I'm forty like you in your little bitty skirt in your fishnet pantyhose low-cut demi bra just to boost the tips.

Sylvie loves Pumpkin, but she loves Tony more. Loves Tony like a rock, pulling pale-blue lined spiral notebook from between the mattresses. And a pencil or a purple grape pen. She writes about a life as a wife, as a mother, writes him letters so he'll know, make him see where she stands on the Mrs. Macaroni issue. Honey, we will live in a Motel 6, eat HoJo clams, buy Charles Shaw wine, that Two-Buck Chuck, come home drunk and fool around on the bed, yo Tony, want to fuck me? But she hides the book away.

From Bob Arter's "Pictures Of You", and . . .

The restaurant is mostly glass, a glorified A-frame that juts over the river. Piped-in music plays, muted, floating notes, soft jazz. Spotlights sweep the water on this windy night, whitecaps lash the dock pilings, and Ed fills Marcy's glass, again, with red wine. Tonight is a celebration. Marcy's getting married to a man named Daniel Bryce. She's excited, talking with her hands.

"He's good in bed, Ed," she says, and laughs. "That's what I said, Ed. No, he really is. Jim was a disaster, you know? Two minutes of foreplay and then he'd just stick that thing in and expect me to be all, ooh, do me, you so good."

Marcy's slightly inebriated, Ed thinks, and she's not the only one. The room, he notices, is spinning slightly. They need to eat. Ed signals the waitress and orders a plate of mussels, and Marcy goes, "I want some gin. May I please have some gin with grapefruit juice?"

"You look nice," Ed says, and it's true. She's wearing silk, a blue blouse with tiny ruffles around the collar, black jeans, and shiny shoes. Her blouse is a plunging, V-neck affair. Cleavage, lots of cleavage.

"Daniel wants me to tone it down, wear sweatshirts, but believe me, Mr. Brown Shoes needs to work his own shit out first."

"Can we not talk about the wonders of Daniel tonight?" Ed says. His stomach rumbles, and he cups it with his hand. Ed lives alone, in an apartment two miles away. He used to sleep with Marcy, but he tells himself now that it was never serious or all that great. In time, they turned into best friends, and now she's leaving - now she's leaving Ed and the whole state of North Carolina to live in stupid Florida.

Jeff Landon's "Castanets."