A poem by alum John Minczeski (poetry, ’90) appears at the The Cortland Review:
It was lightning and the steady roll of thunder
Looming closer like a science fiction horror
Slurping humidity until there was no more.
If the sirens went off,
The wind took their breath away.
Then it became someone else’s storm,
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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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Three poems by alum Laure-Anne Bosselaar (poetry, ’94) appear at the The Cortland Review:
Sundowner Wind
Three days now & the sundowner stubborn: a hot hiss
in the jacaranda. It's in bloom & there is no blue
like this one, dusted by drought & dusk
but flowering all it can—
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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
A poem by alum Maeve Kinkead (poetry, ’08) appears at the The Cortland Review:
Dissolve two tablets in a jelly glass of tap water.
Bring it to your Daddy rumbling the music
of Borborygmi in his maroon wing chair.
Turn the dial on the Zenith radio—no more
reports from Korea and Pork Chop Hill.
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Three poems by alum Rosalynde Vas Dias (poetry, ’06) appear in Hobart:
Learn a Story
I was so jealous when I heard on the radio
about computers watching movies, putting it all together
like Eve eating knowledge. Imagine a computer
plodding through it’s first dim conception of human
emotion, narrative arc, as if it were a horse driving a mill,
plodding, moving, an organic thing and a mechanism.
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Alum Reginald Dwayne Betts (poetry, ’10) is profiled in this 7-minute video story from PBS NewsHour:
An interview with alums Shadab Zeest Hashmi (poetry, ’09) and Alicia Jo Rabins (poetry, ’09) appears on the San Diego Writers, Ink website:
How does a poem come to you?
Shadab: Poetry casts its net when the unsayable offers itself, often triggered by a collision between a sensory moment and a feeling. It animates the abstract by appearing as a fine gradation of color, sound or scent, a sensation counterpoised against a memory. A poem comes to me as a sudden, partial illumination of the unanswered, perhaps the unanswerable, as experienced in music, or visual images of both the monumental and the intimate. A poem seeks to make its own lexicon, to attempt to define and describe the world as seen through the psyche’s filter.
A poem by alum Jennifer Givhan (poetry, ’15) appears in Hermeneutic Chaos Journal, where it was a finalist for the Jane Lumley Prize ’15:
When I was still small I began growing antlers
as a stag grows antlers, as a girl grows
breasts. My chest remained flat & the blood
didn’t come, but the velvet skin
sprang spongy behind my temples. No one at school
laughed at the antlers like they did when I’d grown
hair under my arms & razor-scraped my shins
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A story by alum Michelle Collins Anderson (fiction, ’13) appears at Literal Latté:
I got the note in Esmé’s backpack this afternoon: her long black cape has become “a distraction to the class” and she is no longer welcome to wear it to school. There was no mention of the wand. It is difficult to be a wizard among “Muggles” — your average, run-of-the-mill human beings. Just as I am finding it difficult to be human when I would gladly summon magic or pray for miracles. Justin is with the hospice nurse now. She is checking his vital signs, making notes, checking the log of medications — the amounts, the times given — that I keep so meticulously, my letters curling around the white spaces of the chart. Soon she will bathe him, a sponge bath that will clean away the perspiration but will not erase the yellow of his skin. She will let me do the shampooing and the shaving: I insist. Justin was not — is not — a vain man, but he did love his hair. It is thick and black and edged with gray; he liked to keep it just the slightest bit long, which gave him the rumpled professor look I love. He is an artist, a painter, but made his living as the creative director at a local ad agency — overseeing all the words and images that go into ads and commercials and websites. He is what they call a “creative guru,” a “big idea” man: he sees forest, not trees; constellations rather than stars.
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