A poem by alum Matt Hart (poetry, ’02) appears at Monster House Press’s blog:

The word is pain,
and the world is pain,
but the sun on our skin
is enormous and light.

I went out running
this morning, the way
I always do, awkwardly

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michael-sharickA short story by alum Michael Sharick (fiction, ’15) appears at No Tokens Journal:

I was over at Duke’s place feeding the dog and delivering his smokes, which he’s not supposed to have, and Karen calls, right at Duke’s house, she calls, for me. She asks if I can please drive to the airport and pick up the Robinson family; they’re on their way home from Disney World, and someone from Make-a-Wish forgot to book them a ride.

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A poem by alum Leslie Contreras Schwartz (poetry, ’11) appears at Hermeneutic Chaos Journal:

My body holds pockets full
of other bodies, secreted cells of my parents,
inside my grandparents, nested
in an infinity of theirs and theirs.
I am made of those sweat-filled
sheets of sorrow,
a clothesline of flinching blouses
waiting for that slap and back-beat

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Alum Krys Lee (fiction, ’08) has a profile about her life and work, including her latest novel, How I Became a North Korean, in the L.A. Times:

Standing in the heart of Koreatown, novelist Krys Lee is turned around.

Was this the direction to the Korean market to which her family made a pilgrimage every weekend, and her mother would rent her cache of Korean videotapes? Which way was the tofu restaurant she and her pastor father walked to countless times, after her mother died and there was no one to cook him Korean food?

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An essay by alum Natalie Baszile (fiction, ’07) appears at Buzzfeed:

It’s 2 o’clock on a Thursday afternoon in early May, and the air inside the New Orleans airport smells like fried shrimp, mildew, and a hint of the Gulf. It’s a comforting smell, at least to me, and every time I fly down here from California, the first thing I do after stepping off the plane into the terminal is inhale deeply.

If I were here by myself, I’d be on the road by now, easing into the Crescent City or flying down Highway 90 towards New Iberia, where my friends live. But this trip is different: I’m on a mission. I’m meeting my mother, my dad, and my sister, Jennifer, whom I just started talking to after a two-year estrangement. I’m taking them on a drive along the Boudin Trail.

We have a lot to heal on this trip.

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A poem by alum Ian Randall Wilson (fiction, ’16; poetry, ’02) appears at The Collagist:

All night I think
how earth gives up
its bones.  A thousand
thousand years and all
that’s left.  The little nags
my thoughts again
though in a different order.

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A short story by alum Maryse Meijer (fiction, ’09) appears at The Collagist:

He steps around the body and its shadow of blood. The head, where’s the head? He leans closer; some kind of mashed in. Pulverized. But it’s all here. Kneeling he sniffs, pokes, prods, guesses, wonders. A bit of brain like putty dried on the oven door. One of the cops whistles. The detective stands. Peeling off gloves, giving orders, pages of notepads flickering. Making the usual jokes. He turns his back on the other guys, rubs his eyes. Somehow he is expected not to go crazy. Blood even on the flowered wallpaper. He squints. The flowers and the blood compete for white space. He is sure a woman was here. Circles of blood on the linoleum left by a pair of pumps. Either she did it or she watched it and didn’t make a call and that makes her a bad lady.

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Noah StetzerAlum Noah Stetzer (poetry, ’14) has a new chapbook titled Because I Can See Needing a Knife out now from Red Bird Chapbooks. Following is a poem from the chapbook:

What Knots Know

So I unlace our shoes; strands of leather
and cotton snick as tips slide out each eye.
I push this nib into my pillowcase,
pick apart the warp and weft, unweave both
into yarn and thread; lay across our bed
laundry twine, red spools of Christmas ribbon.
My canvas belts and your silk neckties: what
you don’t know is everything can be tied.

Learning rope gives you a knack for “two-round
turns into an overhand hitch with one
more pass.” This one takes unlayed strands, the string
pieces untwisted and works them tightly,
until they spiral.  No love poem, instead
I tied a rope to you; with the far end—
called “running,” “living,” “tagged” —attached to me.

An essay by alum Dawn Abeita (fiction, ’96) appears dawn abeita the Superstition Review blog:

Guest Post, Dawn Abeita: Virginia and Flannery Together Again

Last year I went on two literary pilgrimages: Great Britain/Virginia Woolf, and Georgia/Flannery O’Connor.

The juxtaposition wasn’t intentional. My husband had work in London and I tagged along, walked around the tiny corner of Woolf’s London called Bloomsbury, then got a car and left him there working while I rambled around Sussex where she later lived. Which is to say that I drove down lanes with hedges that constantly swatted my side view mirrors to visit ramshackle houses with frowsy and riotous interiors.

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