“Jesus Said,” a 15-poem sequence by alum Patrick Donnelly (poetry, ’03) appears at Mudlark:

Jesus said to me Did you mean

to draw some moral
from your own life, how you found love

so late? How though you weren’t patient,
weren’t kind, in pursuit were ruthless,

it was given to you anyway? Though
that story’s not done, not proven,

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Note: Five poems from the sequence originally appeared in the American Poetry Review; the whole sequence will appear again in The Orison Anthology, 2017, and the first poem of the sequence will be issued as a letterpress printed broadside from the Center for Book Arts in New York City, in connection with a reading there, fall 2016.

Two poems by alum Lisa Gluskin Stonestreet (poetry, ’05) appear at PLUME:Lisa Stonestreet poem

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Audio interviews and poems by alum Kerrin McCadden (poetry, ’14) are featured at Fishouse Poetry. Following is an excerpt from the poem “The Dead”:

They worry I won’t keep the graves when they’re gone.
See my mother brushing off her hands

at her mother’s grave, surveying lots,
approving and disapproving care and neglect,

my father deep in thought. The trees above
them are the gods of Massachusetts, big-

Continue reading online. An interview with Kerrin about her debut collection Landscape with Plywood Silhouettes is also up at Ploughshares’ blog: http://blog.pshares.org/index.php/the-poems-toggle-between-wreckages-an-interview-with-kerrin-mccadden/.

A poem by alum Leslie Contreras Schwartz (poetry, ‘2011) appears in Glass: A Journal of Poetry as part of  the series “Pulsamos: LGBTQ Poets Respond to the Pulse Nightclub Shooting”:

The baby has been crying all day
and I don’t know why. Head
back, swollen face, looking

to me. Looking to me,
he cries like he can’t
see me. He cries as if pulling
from some deep well,

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A Piece of Sky, A Grain of Rice: A Memoir in Four Meditations by alum Christine Hale (fiction, ’96) is out now from Apprentice House Press. The following is an excerpt:

The grass surrounding the retreat house stands waist-high, an entire spring’s lush growth left uncut through the thirty days of Saga Dawa, the holy month of the Buddha’s enlightenment. To kill or even to disturb the hordes of sentient beings living on and inside and beneath the tangle would be inauspicious in this season.

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Four poems by alum Kerrin McCadden (poetry, ’14) appear at Tinderbox Poetry:

The Television on the Curb

The boy across the way takes everything I put out on the curb. So far,
he has taken horse-head bookends, iron garden gates, a lazy Susan,
old brown drinking glasses. Eventually, he will take the television.

Continue reading online (other poems here, here, and here)…

 

Two poems by alum Noah Stetzer (poetry, ’14) appear at Tinderbox Poetry:

On Watching Old Movies

After dry cleaner, after supermarket, after housework;
after Windex, after Pledge, after Joy; after Woolite, after All, after Bounce;
after he comes home at five, after dinner at six, after TV at eight;
after the evening news, after the eight o’clock sitcoms, after Jon Stewart;

Continue reading “On Watching Old Movies” online (the second poem, titled “Gunnr,” can be read here)…

A poem by alum Justin Bigos (poetry, ’08) appears at Tinderbox Poetry Journal:

  He’d have drowned, without me.
            -Carl Phillips

They kept saying leave nothing out, I can still hear them saying
leave nothing out while I went on talking without a break
about the incident in the parking lot behind 7-Eleven.
Not really a parking lot, not the main one anyway,
but a lot behind that lot, behind the store, where clerks unloaded

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Three poems by alum Jennifer Givhan (poetry, ’15) appear at Cultural Weekly:

Machine for Second Chances

Here we’ve tried blessing
the trauma, the fire to our skin

in which I’ve awoken crying who held the matches
into the matches of my hands.

What can I tell you? Love
held an iron’s cord to our necks, balanced

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A poem by alum Regan Huff (poetry, ’09) appears at The Collagist:

From a plane, the surface in all the contours
and the indistinct edges, the half-yellows
and off-whites and the thick, pasty, verging-on-blues
seems like the landing place
for lost humans, soft and accommodating
and at a remove from evil.

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