A poem by alum John Minczeski (poetry, ’90) appears at The New Yorker:
The martyr does not die. He lives to create more like him.
The conscience lives behind an anonymous window
In tangletown. It is difficult to find the right one.
You call and call and there is no answer. But never
A busy signal. The martyrs climb one side
Of a mountain and descend the other. It is a world
Full of dangers, hidden crevasses, avalanches,
Two poems by alum Dilruba Ahmed (poetry, ’09) appear in the May/June 2016 issue of American Poetry Review. One of the poems is featured online:
“MOTHER’S REVENGE: AFGHAN WOMAN ‘KILLS 25 TALIBAN’ AFTER SON SHOT DEAD”
Careful, now,
the gun still
in my hands—
who among us
wouldn’t open
fire for smaller
a wound?
My hands reek
of gunpowder,
a carbine. Who
has not perceived
that parenting
is to savage
the beast
that threatens
our offspring?
Bear with me.
Continue reading online…
An essay by alum Peggy Shinner (fiction, ’94) appears at Jet Fuel Review:
We didn’t have a bookshelf in our house. Behind the TV in the den there was my father’s bowling trophy and the one book he read, or at least bought, Jim Bouton’s Ball Four. We didn’t have a bookshelf until we hired Mr. Klück, a fat bossy Holocaust survivor-turned contractor to finish our basement, and then there were two built-in units with my mother’s dime store paperbacks (James Michener, Leon Uris, Jacqueline Susann), the white leather-bound World Book encyclopedia set with gold lettering on the spine, which I flipped through randomly, settling on biographies and pictures of tropical birds, and an improbable copy of Émile Zola’s Nana.
Continue reading online…
Five poems by alum Pam Bernard (poetry, ’95) appear at Mudlark:
Marsyas’ Howl
the victor departs wondering whether out of Marsyas’ howling there will not someday arise a new kind of art— — Zbigniew Herbert
If not winter, what must Marsyas have felt, so artfully flayed, his visage stripped from him, all of a piece, until his fingertips were the last to know wholeness. He could see his countenance lifted from him just as this snow is lifted from us. Two fists Continue reading online...
A story by alum Ronald Alexander (fiction, ’13) appears at Hollywood Dementia:
As he slathered lotion on his face and scrubbed to remove the morning’s heavy makeup, he couldn’t help imagining what his father might say about a grown man who worried over his appearance. Van blotted with tissues and began to brush his hair, stiff with spray. He thrust his jaw forward and studied his reflection. He wondered about his weak chin and if that was the reason he was stuck in this network daytime soap opera with no offers for anything better.
Continue reading online…
A short story by alum Ian Randall Wilson (poetry, ’02) appears at Solstice:
On Friday, following a cold night, the thermometer outside the Theatre District branch of Peoples Bank read 90° at 9:03 A.M. Mayor Bloomberg was on time for the taping of his weekly address. Zwakker awoke in his hotel with the radio tuned to a Christian station demonizing Islam; he changed the time before he located the off switch. An unidentified homeless man collapsed on a sewer grate at the corner of Worth & Baxter blocking a bus heading uptown. On the local ABC affiliate, the meteorologist, determined to prove she had not been hired merely for the size of her breasts, speculated that the earth had swung on its axis, shifting toward the sun, which accounted for the high temperatures outside; the channel went to commercial. Babe Parrell took a taxi to LaGuardia Airport and was halfway there before she realized she’d left her tickets at home; she started laughing. Fares who laughed for no good reason made all Sri Lankan cab drivers uneasy. Traffic was backed up on the Bronx-Whitestone bridge. A car belching an exhaust of burned oil entered the Midtown Tunnel. Downstairs in the lobby of Zwakker’s hotel, Zwakker passed by a turbaned Sikh who was drawing glances, the wrappings on his head a magnificent shade of purple — to some. At the front desk, Zwakker reviewed each item on his bill, noting the .0125% increase in city taxes since his last visit. He went through the revolving front doors, a square of bloodied tissue staunching a cut chin.
Continue reading online…
A poem by alum Rose McLarney (poetry, ’10) appears at Fogged Clarity:
There will be sweat at the back of your neck
seven months out of the year. That’s true,
that and an ugly history too. At least, in the South,
the Ice Age never quite passed through.
I can say that while glaciers scraped the North
clean, here there was only a little winter.
Continue reading online…
Three poems and an essay by alum Andy Young (poetry, ’11) appear as a special feature at storySouth:
Far from Her in Egypt under Curfew
We got babysitters
so we could go the Square, cut lemons for our scarves—
the small, thin triangular ones
she said were for people
of the Book. Wearing one,
you could be any one of the three
religions, she said, though
her Egyptian self is seen
as foreign: her clothes,
Continue reading online…
A short story entitled “Eat You Up” by alum Nancy J. Allen (fiction ’12) was published in the 2016 Saturday Evening Post’s Best Short Stories. The e-book is available from Amazon.
Alum Laura Van Prooyen (poetry, ’10) received the $1,500 Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award for her five poems published in the Fall 2015 issue, including “Elegy for My Mother’s Mind.”
A poem by alum Mike Puican (poetry, ’09) appears at The Collagist:
One of me replays what he should have said
to the judge at the custody hearing. One of me
walks the shoulder of I-80 while the sumac
bursts into a scatter of sparrows. One of me wades
into a rain-filled rock quarry while another
of me watches from the other side.
Continue reading online…
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