Two poems by alum Noah Stetzer (poetry, ’14) appear at The James Franco Review:
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This hangnail: the good sweet ouch of a small
tearing without thinking here on my thumb;
a deep red line creeps circling the dull nail,
a dark slow-welling of blood running down
and around the nail bed. Should it sizzle,
should it smoke a little above the tip
of my left thumb; sulfurous devilry
Continue reading online…
A poem by alum Shadab Z. Hashmi (poetry, ’09) appears at Ink Knode:
Qasida of the water pipe’s gurgle on a starry night
Midnight alley, the poet watches jinn silhouetted
in pursuit of jinn on slim ledges of balconies—
secrets leaking like watered-down ink—
In the walled city, a bone-biting winter night
never comes without the witness of coal,
brass pots and the nightly haleem cooked
by the same Mughal family for generations
Continue reading online…
A poem by alum Fay Dillof (poetry, ’15) appears in Shadowgraph Quarterly:
Now trees, that tree,
part dead, part red, where plums,
who knows when, the seasons exploding
into one another, will form
and then it’ll be
a competition: squirrels v the height
we reach on chairs. And the heart
is not the pit but the hard bite
Continue reading online…
A poem by alum Muriel Nelson (poetry, ’96) appears at Hayden’s Ferry Review:
On Silent Haunches
after Carl Sandburg
Dear diapered cloud bottoms.
Sleepy nursery in the sky.
White wind noise, now blessedly shushed.
I want to write with your light,
ice storm,
with your slick piles of chimes.
Continue reading online…
A poem by alum Noah Stetzer (poetry, ’14) appears at the HIV Here & Now website, a 365-day countdown in poems to 35 years of AIDS on June 5, 2016.
But if you do not worship, you will immediately be cast into the midst of a furnace of blazing fire; and what god is there who can deliver you out of my hands?
—Daniel 3:15
Tied at my mouth, tongue knotted with my tongue,
this stone this knife this bitter herb—older
than Easter with rusty thumbnails digging
into the skin on the sides of my chest—
exhaled stale breath into my lungs, pushing
sand and hot and grit inside inflating
until I hovered halfway between floor
and ceiling my lips blistered with cold sores.
Continue reading online…
An essay by alum Nathan Poole (fiction, ’11) appears at drafthorse:
The Building Marked 1: A Vision of Industry in the South
“It punishes me to look, though there’s comfort in the keeping, a punishing comfort.”-James Still
I. Band Mill, Graham Co. lbr. Co.
On August 14th 1916, someone in the town of Andrews, NC, mailed a hand-dated postcard they purchased from Davis Pharmacy. Unlike the scenic cards one might find today at a gift shop in Western North Carolina, this was a photograph of the Graham County Lumber Mill—not a quaint, water-driven gristmill along some backwater creek, but a sprawling and muddy lumberyard. And the mill is not simply caught here, as if playing foreground to the mountains beyond. It is the subject. To ensure we don’t miss this, the printer embossed the top of the card in small block type with the words, “Band Mill, Graham Co. Lbr. Co.”
Continue reading online…
A story by alum Leslie Blanco (fiction, ’07) appears in the Kenyon Review:
1
Chicago, city of crabgrass and gleaming lakeshore, listen.
Yanet was a bride when she first saw you, with a craving for babies like a craving for a smoke. She loved your margins, those peripheral neighborhoods where botánicas hid like spider webs in corners. How many times she passed and thought of a trabajito, a red candle for Santa Barbara (patron saint of the disenchanted), or a cigar for Changó (Yoruban and now Cuban god of revenge), and of course the foreign incantations that would vanish you for a moment like the fog that sometimes engulfed downtown completely. She loved your Aztec virgins, the ones who paraded up and down Western Avenue in red dresses so tight she could see every ripple on their thighs. She loved your seedy jazz clubs and the old foreign women no one bothered to stop and listen to.
Continue reading an excerpt of the story online. The full story can be found in the January/February 2016 edition of the Kenyon Review. You can also find a conversation with Leslie about the process of writing “My Amor, My China, Mi Delirio” and other topics at the Kenyon Review’s website.
A poem by alum Matthew Jude Luzitano (poetry, ’12) appears in Green Mountains Review:
The Extra Key
appeared from nowhere beside the others,
wrought iron, thick as a quarter.
Seven numbers engraved on its head, some inscrutable.
Charcoal landscapes in its valleys and plateaus.
Cut like the line of a cliffedge.
Continue reading online…
Three poems by alum Dilruba Ahmed (poetry, ’09) appear at The Collagist:
Tale
We have
always wanted
a way home—
a way home
to that house
in the forest
a house by turns
loving and cruel
if only because
to love
is to suffer
inconsolably.
To be eaten
alive by it.
Continue reading Tale and Dilruba’s second and third poems, Resolution and Ghazal, online…
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