A poem by Dilruba Ahmed (poetry, ’09) appears in Poetry:
… continue reading here.
Three poems and audio by Rose McLarney (poetry, ’10) appear in Terrain:
Writing on a Scrap of Paper in Reach
Slipping over museum marble floors, it was so easy—
movement between places and people. In this room,
modern American painters, step to the next,
to traditional African pots. Not so outside
the hush of those halls of protection,
navigating the living, struggling city. A street
… continue reading the rest of the poem here.
Two other poems, “When to Wear a Strapless Dress, and Not Consider What is to Come” and “Wildfires, Election Week” appear immediately following “Writing on a Scrap of Paper in Reach,” and have accompanying audio.
A story by Abby Horowitz (fiction, ’15) appears in Memorious:
My Husband Had a Name Once and So Did My Son
When I come home at night from yoga, I am so heartless, I cannot even pet the dog. I would rather sit on my hands than reach out to touch his fur, even when he nuzzles next to me on the couch.
Why are you sitting like that? my husband asks. Isn’t that uncomfortable?
I’m practicing, I say.
My husband does not ask: For what? Once we danced around this room rehearsing the tango for our wedding. Now he picks up the crumpled tissues scattered about the living room floor. [… continue reading here.]
An article by Nick Fox (fiction, ’09) appears in the Music section of Waxwing:
Dom Flemons and the Unsung Stories of America
Dom Flemons isn’t exaggerating when he says I’ve caught him at a good time. A week earlier, he played his first show in his hometown of Phoenix since he left Arizona in 2005. A few days later, he took the stage at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville for a New Year’s Eve performance which was picked up and broadcast on the Grand Ole Opry. All of this closing out a year in which he was named to the board of directors of Folk Alliance International and performed on the Washington Mall as part of the grand opening of the National Museum of African American Heritage and Culture. [… continue reading here.]
A story by Robin Black (fiction, ‘05) appears in Waxwing:
My Parents Are Cruel to My Brother
My parents are cruel to my brother. He says they are cruel to me too, but that I have, we both have, become blind and deaf and numb to their cruelty — for ourselves, not for the other. He says that we have switched our skins so I feel his hurt and he feels mine. He says that when they stand close to him, he isn’t there, when they are near enough to breathe on me, I disappear. He says I don’t remember, because you don’t. He says it is like death that way. [… continue reading here.]
A story by Fred Arroyo (fiction, ’97) appears in Waxwing:
Sleeping Bear: An Autobiographical Fable
At the river’s mouth, where it poured brown with glints of iron into Lake Superior, the father stumbled on a lump of black coarse fur. It didn’t look soft enough for a dog, the shape of the upper shoulder too large for cat or raccoon, its arm streaked with a line of gold fur. Down on his knees the father cleared away the cold wet sand with a piece of driftwood, and in the bluing evening light he found the cub’s head, his eyes closed, his nostrils filled with sand, his paws frozen in the scoop of swimming through the wailing storm of the night before, or running along the shore as he bawled for his mother. [… continue reading here.]
A series of poems by Shadab Zeest Hashmi (poetry, ’09) appears in Mudlark:
… for the rest of the series, click here.
William Morris, Strawberry Thief (textile design)
Strawberry Thief Singing
The thrush, caught jubilant, after stealing ripe fruit from the artist’s garden, goes to a prison of textile, serves a sentence of centuries in cotton, needles passing through her feathers, stitches on the sigh (or the ghost of song) in her bill, on wings. She will be stretched on Raj furniture across the commonwealth, a souvenir in chintz, her crime displayed on bedspreads. She will hang from windows, a doll of the wind.
Four stories by David Rutschman (fiction, ‘02) appear in Waxwing:
A method for appeasing jackals
Make a jackal from the pieces of jackal in your own body and offer the jackal you have made to the jackals that surround you. Sing the appropriate song: Jackals, I give you a jackal / made from my own body / jackals, a delicate feast!
The jackal you make from the jackal-pieces of your own body must be a living jackal. The jackals that surround you will eat a dead jackal of course (they’re scavengers) — but after eating they will not be appeased, which means that you must locate only the living pieces of jackal within your own body.
… continue reading “A method for appeasing jackals” here.
… also read “Employee,” “Tree, Bird, Spoon,” “The Guest,” & “I was digging a hole”
Three poems by Victoria Chang (poetry, ‘05) appear in Waxwing:
Barbie Chang Pokes Through
Barbie Chang pokes through her
mother’s purse
the little brown hearse of lipstick and
blush her mother would
have let her go through her purse
because she pursued
… continue reading here.
… read “How Alone Barbie Chang’s Mother” & “Barbie Chang Refuses”
Subscribe to the Friends of Writers Forum and receive notifications of new posts by email.