Paintings by Colombian artist Enrique Grau.

Mark Twain in Tesla's workshop.

Photos of Hong Kong at night.

In Response to a Rumor That the Oldest Whorehouse in Wheeling, West Virginia Has Been Condemned
By JAMES WRIGHT

I will grieve alone,
As I strolled alone, years ago, down along
The Ohio shore.
I hid in the hobo jungle weeds
Upstream from the sewer main,
Pondering, gazing.

I saw, down river,
At Twenty-third and Water Streets
By the vinegar works,
The doors open in early evening.
Swinging their purses, the women
Poured down the long street to the river
And into the river.

I do not know how it was
They could drown every evening.
What time near dawn did they climb up the other shore,
Drying their wings?

For the river at Wheeling, West Virginia,
Has only two shores:
The one in hell, the other
In Bridgeport, Ohio.

And nobody would commit suicide, only
To find beyond death
Bridgeport, Ohio.

Paintings by Algerian artist Houria Niati.

Paintings by French Post-Impressionist Henri Ottmann.

The Guild
By SHARON OLDS

Every night, as my grandfather sat
in the darkened room in front of the fire, the bourbon like fire in his hand, his eye glittering meaninglessly in the light
from the flames, his glass eye baleful and stony,
a young man sat with him
in silence and darkness, a college boy with white skin, unlined, a narrow
beautiful face, a broad domed
forehead, and eyes amber as the resin from
trees too young to be cut yet.
This was his son, who sat, an apprentice, night after night, his glass of coals
next to the old man's glass of coals,
and he drank when the old man drank, and he learned
the craft of oblivion-that young man
not yet cruel, his hair dark as the
soil that feeds the tree's roots,
that son who would come to be in his turn better at this than the teacher, the apprentice
who would pass his master in cruelty and oblivion, drinking steadily by the flames in the blackness,
that young man my father.