A poem by alum Rachel Brownson (poetry, ’14) appears at The Collagist:
On either side of the river,
snow hangs off slick rocks,
gathering itself to fall
when it becomes
heavy enough.
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A poem by alum Jennifer Sperry Steinorth (poetry, ’15) appears at The Collagist:
Ordinary Sheers
Scarlet O’Hara made herself
a gown of emerald velvet curtains
flanking book-length, drawing room windows—
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Two poems by alum Kerrin McCadden (poetry, ’14), “The Dead” and “How the Heart Works,” appear at The Collagist.
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-
handed and quiet, tall fathers approving
the play of children in the yard. Somehow
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A story by alum Peg Alford Pursell (fiction, ’96) appears at Permafrost:
My own words woke me up the way it sometimes happens. Manny sat on the edge of the bed, shaving crème stripped away in swaths on his left cheek, razor still in hand. The water still trickled into the sink basin and the fluorescent light glowed miserably over the mirror. I turned away toward the windows. Between the crack in the motel’s heavy drapes the day was bright sunny.
“Active night,” Manny said. The mattress jounced when he stood and returned to shaving. “It sounded like your dad had a harem or something.”
I wasn’t sure I understood what he said, his words were garbled from the way he stretched the skin over his face to hold it taut. I rolled back over, and his eyes in the mirror contacted mine before flicking back to his own face, watching the razor move close to his mouth. Damp hair clung to his nape, a towel wrapped around his beautiful torso. He adjusted the water, rinsed the razor, and finished.
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Friends of Writers is pleased to share three poems by alum Beverley Bie Brahic (poetry, ’06) originally published by Poetry Ireland.
‘Oval like a Mirror’
Oval like a mirror Chardin’s painting
holds a sideboard chock-full of objects,
some almost transparent—
others stubbornly opaque.
The woman has stepped out for a moment:
to fetch the missing ingredient
or respond to the cry of a child?
The mystery of her absence is compounded
by the pair of wine glasses: one hardly touched
but behind it and darker
like a mirror image, the second drained;
and the teacups, white porcelain. Steam climbs
from the near one and a teaspoon’s handle.
In the mirror—if there’s a mirror—the other’s pristine.
The Good Wife
Odysseus, so the story goes, took a long trip, from Ithaca to Ithaca.
And she stayed home weaving the tapestry of her fidelity.
She was never tempted, they say, by apples, pomegranates, or any other telltale signs of woman’s frailty.
Now Odysseus is back. Once again Penelope demonstrates her resourcefulness.
Question: if she’s so smart, why didn’t she rid herself of the suitors?
It’s the sort of question too literal children ask. Why did Goldilocks? Why didn’t Snow White?
And the parents say—It’s only a story, it’s time to turn out the light, it’s late and
we’ve got dishes to do.
. . .
Even once he dispensed with the suitors,
showered and tossed his clothes in the wash,
Penelope feared a god
was hoodwinking her.
Odysseus seethes. ‘Find me some bedding,’
he instructs the nurse, ‘I’ll sleep downstairs.’
‘Prepare him the bed he built,’
Penelope corrects;
‘take it to the hall. Heap it with fleeces
and the coverlets we weave on our looms.’
‘What!’ Odysseus bleats
—‘the bedstead I carved
from an olive tree, whose slender leaves
quake like a virgin on her wedding night—
who the hell cut
my marriage bed from its root?’
. . .
So it is Odysseus, thinks Penelope.
After all these years.
She will miss her suitors. She looks
at Odysseus, she looks at her wools
frilly and green like the vine stock in spring,
black like mildewy grapes
left after the pickers have passed: fermented,
sunsweet, almost wine.
What will she do now, without her suitors?
. . .
Penelope looks at Odysseus; looks at her unfinished tapestry.
Perhaps, she thinks, a touch more carmine in the top right corner.
Near Knossos, A Borrowed House
Over the party wall, voices
arguing. There’s the old man, the
young man, an ingénue’s treble—
grizzled patriarch; downy boy
whose lip’s stained with a mustache; girl
who is marriageable
some god has his eye on.
Day and night: it never stops.
No parting shot with its seal
of blood; no slammed door, boots
stomping off. Not even the long
interrupted silence of Amen, So-be-it.
I suppose they’ve been at it
centuries, like gods and the mortals.
A story by alum Christine Fadden (fiction, ’09) appears at Atticus Review:
Grandmom knew more about baseball and the men who played than I did, but I knew more about mean girls. There were girls in the summer league who would call out those of us who weren’t local, no matter how far back our blood ran through town. Jackie Murray was the meanest local and she didn’t hesitate to rally for a “shoobs-only” team—which would have made about four of us. I didn’t like the term “shoob,” because certainly nobody in my family had ever worn shoes to the beach!
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Four poems by alum Matthew Olzmann (poetry, ’09) appear at The Compass.
Letter to a Dead Goldfish
The child that I was wanted to save whatever life you were,
even if I couldn’t comprehend why
you were called a “goldfish” when no part of you was golden.
You were closer to the color of a clementine wedge:
your back was the unstoppable orange of that fruit’s skin,
and your belly, the white of the pith.
What makes it a “gold” fish? I would ask, and my parents,
exasperated, would answer: That’s just its name.
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An interview with alum Adam Jernigan (fiction, ’15) appears at Quilt:
Where did the idea for ‘Ward’ stem from?
It started with the line “I’m the one killed them kids,” which just came into my mind and stayed there until I wrote the story that went with it. I’ve had other stories begin that way, but this one at least had plenty going on in that one line: the confession to a crime, and, for better or worse, dialect. I wrote the original draft in my first MFA semester. My supervisor, Michael Parker, had pointed out that most of my stories followed a very linear timeline. ‘Ward’ became an exercise in breaking that habit through significant flashbacks that were not introduced with a space break. I forced myself to play with the story’s time and its transitions. Also during that first semester, my mom asked me if I’d ever write a story with a happy ending. ‘Ward’ was my smart-ass answer. Though as I continued to work on the story, I came to feel that it does have a happy ending—at least as happy as I can manage.
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