Foreword J want, I want. It is one of the eternal themes of literature. We have the experience so many times, and recognize the truth so many times, you'd think we'd learn. Wanting is an illusion, because by the time we get what we want we are changed and we want something else. We want the past as much as the future to be different. We regret what we did or didn't do, we want what we think we need both tomorrow and yesterday, and we torture ourselves with longing. We are children under the Christmas tree after all the presents have been opened. Whether our hoard is small or large, already we are moving on to the next thing, imagining that it is the thing we truly need. As an editor of this magazine for years I imagined that if the Missouri Review had a circulation of 3,000, I'd be in heaven. Only the best literary magazines had circulations of 3,000. It would solve all of our problems. Now the Missouri Review has a circulation of 4,500, rapidly moving toward 5,000, and I didn't even notice when we had 3,000. Already I'm dreaming about ten thousand. The contributors to this issue speak of the mysteries and treacheries of wanting in several of its forms. Among the short stories, Keith Kachtick's "Those Who Can't" is about one seemingly quite decent fellow's slide into the perennial delusion and regret of backward longing. Tim Stark's "Waiter" is about a man who faces the problem of staying involved in a world of illusion—waiting tables and guarding the glass door of the Ambassador Room in a tony New York restaurant—after life has just dealt him major shock treatment. Christopher Mcllroy's "The Big Bang and the Good House" is about wandering betwixt the cactuses of lust and greed. Moira Crone's "Fever" is about lust, as well—lust doing combat with fidelity. Philip Graham's wonderful story "Angel" is about giving up one's pain, desire, and regret to the angels. In her essay "Rolex" Diane Johnson tells something of what happens to the dream of America in the lives of would-be immigrants— America, that shining happy place where all problems will be solved. Leonard Kriegel's essay "Wheelchairs" relates what may seem like a very simple desire—to walk—and what he has done to meet it. This issue's poets in some ways oppose each other. Sarah Gorham writes about living along the margins and forever reaching back towards the comfort of home, about diving into the water and losing the boat. "There is a scream," she writes, "I am to blame for everything after." On the other hand, Loretta Collins—our Tom McAfee Discovery Feature poet—seeks wisdom in the path of excess. She yearns to extend the boundaries of experience. One of her poems contains a strange epiphany. She calls the doctor, and the doctor speaks "the alleluia of leukemia." Somehow—in a way that most of us can't understand—that moment when wanting has become irrelevant is a moment of supreme clarity. Perhaps it can only be understood by those who have experienced it, however briefly—the dying, the seekers and holy ones, the remarkable few whose understanding reaches that far despite their "normal" lives. The fourteenth-century Persian mystic Rumi described it simply, recounting a dream that he had: 1 am desperately knocking and knocking at a door, wanting it to open. It opens and I realize I have been knocking from the inside. Our "History as Literature" offering concerns a person who had something of this kind of awakening. He was ruined, totally broken, and he ended up in jail. In the terms set forth by his own greed, he went from the heights to the depths, but in the terms that he grew to understand, he became a better, happier, and more reflective person. He learned a thing or two. The man was Robert Morris, and he had been one of the genuine patriots of the American War for Independence. A few years after he dropped out...