Two poems by alum Jennifer Givhan (poetry, ’15) appear in Reservoir:

Inca Ice Maiden, Momia Juanita

Peru procession to Ampato

I’m left to sleep in a cave of ice,
my belly full of brittle chocolate
and llama meat like the privileged,

like a queen, fattened of gold,
my hair roped in a hundred gangly braids.
There was no path up

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A poem by alum Laura Swearingen-Steadwell (poetry, ’14) appears at The Cortland Review:

Eight hours standing, stocking beer coolers
before the local men shuffled in after work,
brown and worn from building in the sun,
or windburned, caked with ocean salt. I wiped fat
off the cylinders of the hot dog machine until
I smelled metal; made change; spoke to anyone:

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A poem by alum Muriel Nelson (poetry, ’96) appears at the The Cortland Review:

Look at your clouds asleep on their backs.
The clouds I envy
blew from this scene
in a storm of shades, of sun-splattered wax,
to reconvene in each windy
guise I knew of you, in every
nebulous form.

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Excerpt from “Here I Am, Laughing with Boers” by Laurie Baker

One morning, I meet three Boers in the Pietersburg laundromat. It is a Saturday. I have half a load going—the full extent of my wardrobe—and I am reading a book called In the Heart of the Whore, a book about Boers, coincidentally.

There are three of them, two guys and a girl—big primordial-looking people, red and beefy, even the girl. She has the over-the-top styling of the eighties: feathered hair, blue eye shadow—not unlike other Boer women I’ve seen. The four of us sit awhile in a row of plastic chairs against the store’s front window while they pepper me with questions: genuine interest, it seems, in the school where I teach, the differences between my old life and my new, how it is to be among so many strangers. I am used to the extravagant curiosity of black Africans, but this attention is different. It seems as if we are to be instant friends while understanding we have plenty of reason to dislike each other.

I learn that they work in a bank in town. The guys are flatmates; the smaller one—I retain no memory of his looks other than a soft, blocky dullness—is dating the girl. The other is no more physically distinctive, but he has an irreverence I like. He has the most to say, and the other two, as if younger and in need of guidance, listen with a rapt satisfaction. His name is Jans, pronounced with the y sound, as in yawns.

During a lapse in the conversation, he picks up my book and reads the title aloud. In the Heart of the Whore: The Story of Apartheid’s Death Squads.

     “Here, man!” he says. “Who’s the whore?” I flush and want to snatch the book back. But he has no other reaction, just flips through the pages pointlessly.

 

Thanks to Ploughshares for permission to publish this excerpt.  Purchase a copy and read the rest of the story here:  Ploughshares Winter 2015-16 Edition