An essay by alum Shadab Zeesht Hasmi (poetry, ’09) appears at 3 Quarks Daily:

Okra, mint and chilies grow in the back and marigolds and roses in the front yard; they’re in my peripheral vision as I bike and study. The seeing is important. Before my grandmother began teaching me and before I owned a student desk with wheels, I didn’t care much for Math. It’s now a ritual: I roll my desk out of my room to the verandah, bring a stack of paper and ask my grandmother to give me Math problems I can solve. I do this after my daily bike ride in the yard. My grandmother reads the newspaper while I work on equations. Occasionally, she shares a news item of interest. Twice I’ve seen her tear up reading about the brutality of the Indian military in Kashmir. She is a Kashmiri. She folds her spectacles and closes her eyes when I ask her for a story; it’s typically the one from the Quran about Moses in a floating basket, how he chose coals over gold, and the knotting of his tongue. There is too much brutality in the world and not enough words. The knotted tongue resonates with me.

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Two poems by alum Rose McLarney (poetry, ’10) appear at Construction Lit Mag:

Repeal

The abandoned mansion
from the time of Temperance,
what it must have held:

hair bobbed short,
cocktails poured tall,
not just drunkenness

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A poem by alum Rosemary Kitchen (poetry, ’13) appears at Tinderbox Poetry:

For tonight, let’s forget those cellophane squares

jammed shamefully between the slats of the rattling air conditioner

sweetening the air with spearmint and horehound—

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An essay by alum Faith Holsaert (fiction, ’82) appears at The Courtship of Winds:

Earring holes, chosen by a little white girl in Haiti. Invisible, tonsil scars in her throat. That horse ran away and her father took her to the St. Croix emergency room where a doctor sewed up her knee while the two men talked. And the following week: her first period, but was that a scar? In Santa Fe an Australian Shepherd at the front door frightened the cat in her arms. A jagged scar on her forearm. She was twenty-five, when the first episiotomy, the first cut “down there,” was made, the doctor said to ease her son’s passage. And the male ob-gyn told her husband, the cut would make her tight as a virgin. Bad teeth like her mother’s. Pelvic Inflammatory Disease from a dirty and careless lover. At the end of her thirties, the year after a break-up so visceral that (fill in the blank): gall bladder across her abdomen. Embedded in the bone of her hip, a barbed wire repair. Traction rod hole scars above right shin. Invisible: her tongue almost bitten through in Berkeley the day after her sixty-fifth and her son’s fortieth birthdays, the sting of green soup that evening. Immunocompromised: hepatitis as a consequence of a week in an Albany, GA jail; toxoplasmosis; shingles which still burn at the top of her rib cage. A divot in the flare of her right nostril, skin cancer. Left lens removed for what her sister calls Byronic eyes. A lump taken, leaving a marker like a seamstress’ straight pin in the upper left quadrant of her left breast.

Continue reading part 1 online, and find part 2 here…

A short story by alum Tommy Hays (fiction, ’88) appears at storySouth:

Asa spent what spare time he’d had this past week getting ready for Betsy’s visit—dusting, mopping, scrubbing and putting out enough roach motels to accommodate a convention. It was while putting out the last of the roach motels that he decided he’d have to tell her about the kiss.

Since Betsy wasn’t getting in till late he’d said he’d have dinner ready. She’d often cooked for him when he’d visited in Charleston. Yet when it settled on him what he’d committed to, and counting himself among the cooking impaired, he’d panicked. After a phone consultation with his mother, who talked him down from his culinary ledge, he decided to go for something simple—baked chicken with rice and green beans. For hors d’oeuvres he bought port wine cheese and a box of ak-mak crackers. He splurged on a couple of eight dollar bottles of wine that the clerk had said were even better than Mateus.

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