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Five Points, Vol. 3 No. 1

Fall 1998

From Ellen Bryant Voigt: “We have a huge appetite for order; that’s part of the human animal. We love form of any kind. We just want it, and we want it to continue.”

Sample Content

Mark Jarman
Epistle

Eternity will be strange at first, because there will be no at first.

Still, try this. Think of blank times with other people’s habits, when you had to eat with strangers and strange hosts, and follow their customs and rituals at table. A glass patience took over. Through its panels even watching was a kind of starvation, a sort of drought. The portions lay stranded on large plates. The grace was minimal but stiflingly pious. There was nothing to drink. And the time ahead filled a football stadium.

Then you discovered their peculiar passions—genre fiction, dog breeding. Suddenly you were an umbrella stand of questions. Time, almost like the drink you were denied, turned almost sexy. When you left, sated with information, and even a little drunk with a fizzy affection for the plain, stolid family of doorstops, they invited you back.

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