So, the new Hanging Loose. A chief regret of my trip to Austin was missing Merrill Gilfillan by a few hours at some booth or other. I guess I can publicly admit that sometimes I think Jack Kerouac's spirit busted up into several pieces when he died -- one part, the superconducting supercolliding part, settling on Clark Coolidge's head; another big chunk, the sly Americana realist, transmigrating into Gilfillan:

He had set down there a few weeks earlier to gas up and had taken the loaner car into town for lunch and had seen a young Hunkpapa woman there and hadn't been able to forget her. There was a powwow going on up there this particular weekend and he wanted to go, wanted to see this woman again, a little closer this time, and wanted me to see her as well, I guess. It was a vintage Halfhill scheme, and he had even darkened his hair a little for the occasion.

I'd been wondering how Maggie Nelson would return to lyrics after her harrowing documentary work on the murder of her aunt. In "A Halo over the Hospital" she recounts a visit to a recuperating friend (a professor?) with a level of detail high somatizers may want to get a glass of water before reading:

You looked beautiful
Your eyes blue and lucid
Though your face has been reconstructed
by a team of surgeons, just a few little scars
on the bridge of your nose
and under your chin, no one would ever know
your skin hung on a rack
and they gave you titanium cheekbones
and a titanium jaw, I couldn't tell either
until I brushed your sweet teeth

As a kind of elegy for the living, Nelson's piece isn't the only graphic hospital work to appear recently: Denise Duhamel's terrifying pieces about her parents' injuries in an escalator accident in the anthology Shade.

Also in the magazine: Pieces from the prescription drug series Jeni Olin debuted at The Million Poems Show last fall, aces work by Hat contribs Cynthia Nelson, Albert Flynn DeSilver, Roger Sedarat, and Bill Zavatsky, and a poem by high school age writer Carolyn Johnson in the voice of Britney's sister Jamie Lynn:

I'm not Lindsay Lohan
Who, one day, discovered her boobs
And showed them to the world
And said: "Surprise!"
And also said:
"I believe in the Kaballah,
Because Madonna started believing in the Kaballah..."

Hanging Loose 88 is $9 and available on newsstands and at larger chain bookstores. If your bookstore doesn't carry it, why not suggest it to the buyer.