A poem by alum Nancy Koerbel (poetry, ’92) appears in the Pittsburgh City Paper:
And because it’s mid-July, the dog and I walk long, late,
after the moon’s up and the heat settles, pretending
we’re invisible. Two kids in front of us are sharing a cigarette
and playing Pokémon Go. You can tell. They keep stopping,
starting, looking around. Their cigarette smells really good,
the way cigarettes did once, when smoking was young and delightful.
Continue reading online…
A poem by alum Ian Wilson (poetry, ’02, fiction, ’16) appears at Apricity Magazine:
A man looks at the moon
and sees a woman bathing
in the farthest window
at the end of the block.
Perhaps not bathing,
writing or writhing, weaving
maybe waving — his eyes are not that good.
Continue reading online…
Three poems by alum Leslie Contreras Schwartz (poetry, ’11) appear in Split Lip Magazine:
PHOTOGRAPH OF FRIDA KAHLO SIN ADEREZOS, 1946, BY ANTONIO KAHLO
After surgery, her body weighted against
a wooden chair, eyes mid-blink, her face
curtained by a dark mass of hair, Frida lets
out curls of smoke from the left hand’s cigarette.
Continue reading online…
A poem by alum Jayne Benjulian (poetry, ’13) appears at the Cortland Review:
I drew in pencil since the sketch
required changes, as of mind, or bed
or garden (love in rows).
Late I learned which instruments
& in what order, to plant in stages
Continue reading online…
A poem by alum Muriel Nelson (poetry, ’96) appears at the Cortland Review:
See. Fog’s forming outside, too. Its
blankness arrives there and here
out of nothing. It smothers casually,
but weakens in heat:
it comes to nothing.
Continue reading online…
A short story by alum Dawn Abeita (fiction, ’96
) appears at the Cortland Review:
The day before my mother died our dog, Oblivious, hid under her bed. She was under there an afternoon, a night, and a morning when my mother made it worse by lying on the floor and handfeeding it bits of leftover hamburger. “When she gets hungry, she’ll come out,” I said. Several times. My mother did not believe she should listen to a twelve-year-old, only vice versa.
“What’s gotten into her?” she asked. She was the one who named the dog.
I said, “Now she’s going to poop under the bed. You’ll have to move the bed to clean it up.”
“You don’t know everything,” my mom said. “Don’t you have homework?”
Continue reading online…
An essay by alum Jeneva Burroughs Stone (poetry, ’07) appears at the New England Review’s blog:
Of quantum physics, Einstein remarked, God does not play dice, by which he meant the appearance of randomness is always an illusion. Scientific analysis must yield law, rules, properties. Other physicists disagree in an ongoing theoretical contest pitting Einstein’s classical determinism against quantum randomness. No victor has yet emerged: unity or scatter?
Continue reading online…
A poem by alum Laure-Anne Bosselaar (poetry, ’94) appears at Connotation Press:
Continue reading online…
An excerpt from a story by alum Nathan Poole (fiction, ’11) appears at The Kenyon Review:
In the matted field beside the fairgrounds a young couple worked the idling cars. They had spray bottles and squeegees they lifted from a gas station, and the girl was making all the money. She wore a tight, black dress and yellow, thigh-high knit socks and had to stand on the tires of the lifted trucks while the men stared down at her from their cabs.
It had been like this for two days. Tahoes full of Sigma Alpha Epsilons chanting; lone men in battered vans on parking duty, their families dropped off at the fair entrance; onyx-black Suburbans, the bass rasping the license plates.
Continue reading online…
Two poems by alum Ross White (poetry, ’08) appear at Tinderbox Poetry Journal:
Here Be Monsters
At this point, land disappears into a tail,
a serpent with forked tongue,
scales, eight muscled legs.
Continue reading this poem online, and find Ross’ second poem, “Damned If You Do and Damned If You Do,” here.
Subscribe to the Friends of Writers Forum and receive notifications of new posts by email.